Affect and Social Media

Reviews / Votes

Affect and Social Media: Emotion, Mediation, Anxiety and Contagion, edited by Tony Sampson, Stephen Maddison, and Darren Ellis, brings together theorists and researchers who offer different perspectives on the ways in which affect shows up in social media, from the boredom at the heart of continual engagement with Facebook to the affective shaping of data and how that interrupts everyday life through wearable technologies. . . . What is evident in the works reviewed is the richness of discussion that emerges in bringing these other fields under the lens of affect. * The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory * Social media play an outsized role in our emotional lives. They continually modulate our moods and feelings. They transmit vague sensations that run through us like an infection or contagion. In order to take the measure of social media today, the essays in this volume combine empirical research with far-ranging speculation, offering us analyses that are at once surprising and disturbingly familiar. -- Steven Shaviro, emeritus professor of English, Wayne State University Sampson, Ellis and Maddison's collection is crucial to any understanding of contemporary digital culture. Bringing together many directions of affect theory, theorising across a radical plurality of sites, they skilfully hold on to a vital coherence through critical affect studies inspired by feminist and queer theory and by core contributors in the field (e.g. Clough, Gregg, Seigworth, Paasonen). -- Kate O'Riordan, Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Sussex This is a thought-provoking, occasionally scary, and thoroughly fascinating exploration into the complex networked intensities within which we operate. Spanning from pedagogy to pornography, and beyond, it comes with an international focus and a profoundly interdisciplinary analytical range that make it recommended reading for all interested in understanding the key role that social media plays is contemporary culture.? -- Susanna Paasonen, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Turku