Emotional Public Sphere Research Articles

“Good Australians Will Respond”: Transforming the Work Ethic in Popular Media, 1941–1945

ABSTRACT Media images of heroic, hard-working Australian achievers have often accompanied stories about an upbeat national work ethic to boost public morale in times of massive upheavals and crisis. The concept of an Australian work ethic has not been a natural creation, but it has been actively developed in the media. This article reveals a turning point in the media portrayal of the crucial area of work that helped cultivate diverse expressions of Australia’s image. The article focuses on the era of momentous disruption in World War II that led to an unprecedented idealisation of workers and changed the traditional roles of the prime minister, journalists and the public. Wartime prime minister John Curtin became an egalitarian partner and a collaborator with media teams. Journalists created increasingly inclusive media experiences to encourage the public to identify with the fashionable new ethos of working-class thrift. Wartime citizens enthusiastically contributed to the varied media expressions of collective work ethics, overturning the traditional notion of a passive public sphere. Using the concept of the emotional public sphere, this article provides a rare perspective on the media’s role in shaping and extending popular attitudes towards Australian workers, collective service and inclusive communities.

Emotional Public Sphere: Sentiment Analysis of Tweets after New Zealand Mosque Shooting

Two mass shootings took place on 15 March 2019, in Christchurch, New Zealand. Fifty-one Muslims were killed and 40 others were injured. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern addressed the nation and described the attacks as “one of New Zealand's darkest days”. Ardern's efforts to reassure Muslims as part of New Zealand and enforcing tougher laws to tackle terrorism are appreciated nationally and internationally. This research aims to examine public sentiments towards the attacks and the political management of the crisis. Western media and politicians are criticized for dehumanizing Muslims and stigmatizing them as terrorists. However, Ardern's reaction to this terrorist attack was remarkable in reassuring social cohesion and ensuring Muslims as genuine New Zealand citizens. Thus, studying public emotions towards the attacks and their political management can provide us with fruitful insights concerning political management to the emotional public sphere. To achieve the research aims, data collected from the hashtag #ChristChurch from Twitter, one month after the attacks, through Python programming language and analyzed using Meaning Cloud. The results indicated polarised sentiments, mostly, around negative and positive sentiments. In the conclusion, an interpretation provided for the research results and some insights for future research discussed concerning studying public sentiments post terrorist attacks.

Web Series, YouTube, and Politics: Affective and Emotional Dimensions of WIGS Lauren’s User Comments

This study aims to investigate the complex relationship among entertainment contents, networked publics, and politics by offering an overview of literatures in the fields and suggests that the emotional dimensions are the key to understand the political possibilities of mediated public discussion. By analyzing the online comments of YouTube channel WIGS’s web series Lauren, this article reveals that audiences interpret and discuss this web series through mediated feelings of connectedness and thus are able to engage in public debate and political deliberation. I argue that, the connective affordances of YouTube and the emotional realism of the web-drama facilitated the web space of Lauren to function as an “emotional public sphere” where social solidarity was strengthened, political criticism was developed, and political activity could be motivated. Overall, this study reconceptualizes the place of entertainment media in democracy and everyday life and contributes to political communication and feminist media studies.

Authenticity in Newspaper Coverage of Political Leaders’ Responses to Disaster: A Historical Study

ABSTRACTThe news media both report and evaluate the compassionate responses made by political leaders to communities affected by natural disaster. When these responses are viewed as performances according to Alexander's theory of cultural pragmatics, authenticity—manifest in the display of empathy—emerges as a criterion for their evaluation by journalists. The essay traces the history of these evaluations. Taking Australia as a representative example of both western news traditions and disaster reporting, the essay provides an overview of newspaper depictions and evaluations of prime ministers’ responses to tropical cyclone from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. This reveals increasing value being placed on prime ministers being physically and emotionally engaged with Australians when disaster strikes, including through the display of palpable grief, which is aligned with the mediatization of politics and the emotional public sphere. Also revealed is a turn toward journalists reflexively expressing skepticism about such performed authenticity in a highly mediatized environment. By drawing attention to this skepticism, the essay challenges practitioners to interrogate their contribution to the ongoing evolution of disaster reporting. It also offers an empirical starting point for further studies of this aspect of disaster reporting.

Slide text and emotional public sphere

Slide text and emotional public sphere

Do emotions fit the frame? A critical appraisal of visual framing research approaches

With the rise of a visibly more emotional public sphere, this article asks if visual framing approaches can be enriched by the integration of emotive elements. Focussing on television news, I ask in what way emotions manifest within audio-visual material, and how these representations of emotions and emotive elements can be analysed using visual framing analysis. This understanding is grounded in two recent turns: the turn to the visual and to the affective. Both turns provide the background for current framing understandings and visual framing approaches, and for a discussion of three empirical models of analysis and their varying potential to integrate emotive elements. I distinguish here between a holistic ‘emotion frame’, emotions as narrative structures, and emotion as frame element. I argue that emotions can be best conceptualized as a frame element; and three practical realizations are discussed to what extent they are helpful to analyse emotions empirically in audio-visual news material.

Emotional Public: <i>Treme</i> as Post-Katrina Trauma Narrative

Cultural traumas are social, discursive and narrative processes where traumatic events, such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and their memories are described and interpreted. In fiction, in this case in HBO’s drama series Treme (2010-2013), trauma-related experiences are given meaning through narration, and in this mediation process collective memories are constructed. In this article, I analyze the ways in which the narration of Treme represents loss and remembering. I argue that by emphasizing sentimental nostalgia and the emotional reactions of the characters, the narration aims to create sympathy and empathy in the viewers, and in this way the drama series creates an emotional public sphere for the discussions over the rebuilding of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Commenting on YouTube rants: Perceptions of inappropriateness or civic engagement?

Ranting is often conflated with flaming and hating, which are frequently interpreted as inappropriate forms of online interaction. Scholars have categorized rants, which contain emotional criticisms of something or someone, as “anti-social” (Vrooman, 2002). However, scholars are moving away from universal interpretations of inappropriateness, and now engage in contextual analyses of online behavior. The present study examines a random sample of 330 text comments (drawn from a pool of 13,609 comments) that were posted across 35 rant videos on YouTube. Ranters describe numerous technical and social problems with the video-sharing site. But how are rant videos received on YouTube? Do commenters characterize them as inappropriate? Do rants stimulate productive discussion or do most commenters prefer to express emotional support for the ranter? Rather than displaying personal offense, numerous commenters discussed how problems with YouTube were being publicly revealed in video rants. Such issues are particularly relevant, as expectations about communicative norms are being proposed and contested in new media sites (Markham, 2011). This study argues that under the right circumstances, ranting helps construct an emotional public sphere (Lunt and Stenner, 2005) that generates discussion among similarly concerned YouTube participants about their online communicative rights and privileges.

The management of emotion in British journalism

This article reports on a study which aimed to assess how much attention journalism training and practice currently pay to the idea of emotional literacy, to explore what need news journalists and current affairs filmmakers see for closer evaluation of the emotional dimensions of their work, and to outline a strategy for enhancing emotional literacy in journalism training. While focused on encounters with traumatic situations, the research also addressed emotional aspects of more mundane reporting. This wider agenda links to political and theoretical questions about the contributions of news to the ‘emotional public sphere’, and more broadly to the diverse collection of cultural trends and phenomena concerned with acknowledging, understanding and managing emotions in diverse spheres of life — the ‘affective turn’. The findings of this interview-based study are discussed under the headings of journalists’ relations with sources, colleagues and audiences. They indicate a broad and fundamental ambivalence in the professional discourse of journalism between objectivity and emotional engagement, and a striking inattention to questions about the emotional impact of journalists’ work upon audiences. The article concludes with an assessment of the scope for a more emotionally literate approach to establish itself more firmly in journalistic practice.

The Jerry Springer Show as an emotional public sphere

The public sphere debate in social theory has been a topic of considerable interest amongst scholars analysing the talk show genre. Habermas attached great importance to the potential of rational critical discussion to create consensus and thereby legitimation in democratic society. He was concerned that the media gave a false impression of engagement in a public sphere while managing rights of access and speech in a manner that was inimical to open public discussion. In contrast, cultural commentators on the talk show genre have been impressed by the richness and spontaneity of interactions on the shows, suggesting that they might have a positive role in public participation despite not meeting Habermas’s criteria for a public sphere. In consequence, the literature is moving away from the public sphere debate and focusing on issues of voice and expression in analyses of talk shows. This article, however, makes the argument that many of Habermas’s concerns are still highly relevant to the genre. This is demonstrated through an analysis of The Jerry Springer Show. On the surface, this show seems to have little to do with rational critical discussion. The analysis reveals a number of parallels between the conception of the rational critical public sphere and The Jerry Springer Show, leading to a revision of the received view of Habermas’s work in the analysis of mediated discussion. A range of implications for the mediation of deliberation, participation and expression are explored.