Affective Publics

Over the past few decades, we have witnessed the growth of movements using digital means to connect with broader interest groups and express their points of view. These movements emerge out of distinct contexts and yield different outcomes, but tend to share one thing in common: online and offline solidarity shaped around the public display of emotion. Social media facilitate feelings of engagement, in ways that frequently make people feel re-energized aboutpolitics. In doing so, media do not make or break revolutions but they do lend emerging, storytelling publics their own means for feeling their way into events, frequently by making those involved a part of the developing story. Technologies network us but it is our stories that connect us to each other,making us feel close to some and distancing us from others. Affective Publics explores how storytelling practices facilitate engagement among movements tuning into a current issue or event by employing three case studies: Arab Spring movements, various iterations of Occupy, and everyday casual political expressions as traced through the archives of trending topics on Twitter. It traces how affective publics materialize and disband around connective conduits of sentiment every day and find their voice through the soft structures of feelingsustained by societies. Using original quantitative and qualitative data, Affective Publics demonstrates, in this groundbreaking analysis, that it is through these soft structures that affective publics connect, disrupt, and feel their way into everyday politics.

I HEART #affectivepublics! Zizi Papacharissi brings enormous insight and much needed clarity to current debates about the role of social media in political life. Rejecting binaries which ascribe social movements to Twitter or Facebook or that dismiss all forms of online participation as 'Slacktivism,' she instead acknowledges the ways that social media has provided opportunities for new forms of expression and affiliation, new 'structures of feeling' that can in the right circumstances help to inspire and expand political movements. Her approach mixes theoretical sophistication with empirical rigor as it forces us to rethink what we thought we knew about the Egyptian Revolution and the Occupy movement., Affective Publics transcends the already stale debate between those who see social media as effecting political change and those who castigate it for irrelevant chatter. Instead, in an original move, carefully argued and empirically grounded, Papacharissi shows us how social media facilitate emotionally resonant and collaboratively constructed narratives which, in turn, support civically significant 'soft structures of engagement'., A compelling and necessary read. Papacharissi shows how fact, opinion and feeling are threaded together on social platforms to create affective publics. Where the traditional accounts of normative civic debate online have rejected emotion, this book opens up the potential of messiness, intensity and pathos in networked media., The book comprises a first comprehensive study of this kind, providing both theoretical analysis and empirical methodology and data to highlight the multidimensional character of social media usage in politics., this book offers a unique, rigorous, and well-rationalized argument for analyzing affect and microblogging. ... Certainly this book has the ability to spark future research for scholars across multiple disciplines.

Zizi Papacharissi is Professor and Head of the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She is also the author of A Private Sphere and editor of A Networked Self and the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media.