Abstract
The article explores how affect is circulated and managed in comment discussions on networked online platforms, such as Facebook. A mixed-methods analysis is conducted of comments on news about the triple disaster of an earthquake, a tsunami and a meltdown of three reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March 2011 on public Facebook pages of seven Finnish mainstream news media. The article examines how affect sticks and circulates in these discussions, and how the commenters direct and sustain the mode and mood of Facebook discussions. The main findings of the article concern how online discussions are structured by what the author calls affective discipline, in which participants the discussion manage the mood of the discussion through various means. The results open up an important way to study the internal, affective dynamics of contemporary online discussions. In particular, the study helps us understand how flows of affect are shaped and steered in online discussions, and how the same discussions may simultaneously sustain multiple affective dynamics. These dynamics may, in turn contribute to how publics respond to news and official information in crises.
Highlights
In a contemporary hybrid media environment, a disruptive and unexpected event, such as a natural disaster or a major act of terror tends to spark a mediated response in which mainstream news media and the countless variations of socialEuropean Journal of Cultural Studies 00(0)media refer to one another in an interdependent relationship across the globe (Sumiala et al, 2016; Valaskivi et al, 2019)
As the visual interface and functions available for both users and administrators of Facebook have changed drastically during the last decade,1 and as the company has made the use of the platform increasingly difficult by closing its application programming interface (API) from scholars in recent years (Bruns 2019; Franzke et al, 2020), the empirical data of this study provide a valuable glimpse to how the platform looked and functioned in its earlier days
I will provide a description on the analysis method and the empirical material, before proceeding to discuss how affect appears in the comments about news of Fukushima Daiichi, and how the notion of affective discipline allows for a closer examination of certain dynamics that structure these discussions
Summary
In a contemporary hybrid media environment (cf. Chadwick, 2013), a disruptive and unexpected event, such as a natural disaster or a major act of terror tends to spark a mediated response in which mainstream news media and the countless variations of social. Langlois’ and her coauthors’ account is interesting, as they shift the assumption of online publics and deliberative in the Habermasian sense by focusing on one hand on the non-human agency driving and sustaining networked publics on Facebook (2009: 425, 429), and on the other hand on the seeming fragility of the implied focus on rational deliberation They highlight how the networked publics are influenced and shaped by what they call informational dynamics and communicational dynamics, that is the technological solutions mostly invisible to the general user that direct how, for example, comments or posts are displayed and to whom (Langlois et al, 2009: 425). I will provide a description on the analysis method and the empirical material, before proceeding to discuss how affect appears in the comments about news of Fukushima Daiichi, and how the notion of affective discipline allows for a closer examination of certain dynamics that structure these discussions
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