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 about politics. 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 feeling sustained 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.
Acknowledgments
Prelude
1. The Present Affect
2. Affective News and Networked Publics
3. Affective Demands and the New Political
4. The Personal as Political: Everyday Disruptions of the Political Mainstream
5. Affective Publics
Notes
References
Index
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Zizi Papacharissi is professor and head of the Communication Department at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Her books include A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age (Polity Press, 2010), A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (Routledge, 2010), and
Journalism and Citizenship: New Agendas (Taylor & Francis, 2009). She has also authored over 40 journal articles, book chapters or reviews, and serves on the editorial board of eleven journals, including the Journal of Communication, Human Communication Research, and New Media and Society.
Papacharissi is the editor of the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, and the new open access Sage journal Social Media and Society.
Making Sense - Margot Northey and Joan McKibbin
Digital Cities - Karen Mossberger, Caroline J. Tolbert and William Franko
Democracy's Fourth Wave? - Philip N. Howard and Muzammil M. Hussain
Bits and Atoms - Edited by Steven Livingston and Gregor Walter-Drop
Expect Us - Jessica L. Beyer
News on the Internet - David Tewksbury and Jason Rittenberg
Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age - Jennifer Stromer-Galley
Revolution Stalled - Sarah Oates
Taking Our Country Back - Daniel Kreiss
The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy - Philip N. Howard
The Hybrid Media System - Andrew Chadwick
The MoveOn Effect - David Karpf
Tweeting to Power - Jason Gainous and Kevin M. Wagner