As social media continues to become integrated into our daily lives, various aspects of human experience have found novel forms of expression online. In this panel, the sixth spotlighted for this weekend’s Theorizing the Web conference, four researchers discuss how emotion is variously communicated, interpreted and experienced on the internet, and what these changes portend for our understandings of self and the social world.
By suggesting that the much-abused “weak ties” formed through social networking online may actually lead to a natural form of solidarity, Lisa Sanders turns much of criticism of Web 2.0 on its head; comparative ethnographic work done by Andrea Baker analyzes the dynamics involved in forming strong social communities online, including the factors conducive to emotional bonding; Meghan Rossatelli explores how expressing affect online structures our understanding of emotional experience; and Tamara Peyton discusses how the ubiquity of the “Like” button is changing what was once understood as a personal emotion into a public declaration that becomes subject to social scrutiny and capitalist exploitation.
Read the abstracts below the break for a fuller preview of the talks and come by Saturday at 9:30 to join the discussion.
Lisa Sanders, “Computer Mediated Communication and Emotional Effervescence”
The (post)modern person’s life is, of course, made up of a multitude of social connections. But, unlike in the past, these social connections are more numerous and are more widely dispersed over space, and yet can virtually take place at the speed of light. Additionally, these connections are increasingly facilitated by one computerized device or another: phone calls, text messages, emails, instant messaging, photo sharing, video chatting, etc, are all important and significant computer-mediated means of social interaction in the 21st century. With these adjustments to today’s hypermobile way of life, the question of whether or not bodily co-presence is necessary for meaningful human interaction seems to answer itself if one simply looks at the world-wide usage statistics for social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. But, the question of how meaningful this non-co-present interaction is remains. In other words, do human beings, as a species, truly need face-to-face interaction in order to fully and meaningfully communicate with one another?
Using the theories of sociologists Jonathan H Turner and Randall Collins as a starting point, I argue that the greater speed and variety of daily face-to-face interactions in which modern humans are involved leads to increased anxiety. This is because, as Turner suggests, human beings are a species that initially evolved to be primarily solitary and to favor mostly weak, fluid social ties. In order to deal with the physiological and emotional anxiety caused by today’s modern hyper-interactions, human beings have created a new “space” to interact, where computer mediated communication (CMC) dulls those certain biological instincts that can inhibit face-to-face communication in our species.
Turner proposes that it was an evolutionary need for increased social solidarity and cooperation in the wild that caused our relatively unsocial hominid ancestors’ brains to develop an emotional “add-on” that allowed for increased communication (and thus sociality) for the purposes of survival. However, according to Turner, the influence of our more primal brain structure lingers, and we, as a species, aren’t actually as socially inclined as many sociologists insist. From this stance, I argue that different parts of the brain are attracted to different aspects of cyberspace — the section of Turner’s brain that longs for physical isolation from other apes loves the long distance aspect of CMC, while the part of Turner’s brain that is more attuned to social interaction for social solidarity’s sake enjoys the fast paced IR chains (Collins), which can be richly symbolic and yield high levels of emotional effervescence.
Thus I am arguing that the Internet works as a tool for social solidarity not despite both Turner and Collins’ objections about its lack of bodily co-presence but because of it. Without being bogged down by the trappings of physical proximity, humans are able to use CMC to engage in highly accelerated interaction rituals which generate high levels of emotional effervescence amongst their participants.
Tamara Peyton (@pstamara), “From emotion to action: The ontological politics of the ‘like’ button”
With the inclusion of a “like” button feature on Facebook, and the subsequent adoption of the metaphor on other social media sites such as YouTube, the idea of liking someone or something has changed. What it means to like has moved away from the realm of the emotive internal life of individuals and into the realm of the discursive public sphere of societies. Instead of being tied to an internal sensation that reacts almost instinctively to an external stimulus, to “like” now becomes a conscious and rationalized action that provides an external tag of connection between an individual, a discursive element and a social stance. Whether the act of clicking “like” is done to a Facebook status update, a forum post on one’s favourite videogame company website or to a YouTube video, to like is now to act, rather than to feel.
Following Annemarie Mol’s (1999) idea of ontological politics at work in actor networks, this paper will argue that the formerly understood private emotive capacity of liking has been reshaped into an actor. When the like button is included as an option on content, it becomes part of a networked assemblage (2002) of demonstrative capacity that can be read in multiple ways. Remobilized into a status indicator, that acts both as a demonstrator of one’s capacity to align preference towards content, or used to indicate solidarity with another’s social stance, to like is to make known one’s liking. To “like” becomes problematized as the beginning of a chain of actions and connections demonstrated digitally through the stimulation and circulation of discourse.
Similar to Derrida’s (1982) notion of différance, a kind of meaning register shift occurs via this digital discourse. As this paper will demonstrate, the logic of intelligibility is disrupted through the exteriorization of previously interior perceptions and ideas. That shift in register is equally a shift in temporal status. To be known as a “liker” requires a waiting period that occurs between the act of clicking the “like” button and the reading of others of that “liking” action. In that liminal period between clicking the like button and being perceived as a liker, the button exteriorizes the necessity of the anxiety of waiting to the liking user. “Will people be happy that I like this thing? How will my friends react?” are the kinds of things that happen internally in the liker while they wait for the reaction to their reaction.
The liminality is resolved when a liker’s social circle notices their like and is thereby coerced into reacting. Even if the second person makes the choice to not do anything (i.e. to not “like” the item too), that conscious choice is a kind of action. More frequently, however, a chain of liking occurs within one’s social circle, reinforcing the demonstrative and discursive action power of the like button.
This action discourse is then further reinforced as social-political action via the capitalist bent of most social media websites. Given that sites such as Facebook and YouTube are ostensibly free to use, the like feature figures heavily in these social media sites’ market capitalization. To these companies, the idea of liking shifts registers again towards the advertising and investment market. The quantity of those who have liked an item is used by these companies as an indicator of loyal and receptive fans for another company’s products. The act of liking is then removed from the personal user’s hands, packaged up in the overall discourse of liking around a person, product or service, and sold by the social media platforms to other companies and political entities.
As this paper will conclude, to “like” shifts again, moving from the casual social to the serious consumption orientation and proof of taste demonstration within a web of idea flows in Western neoliberal consumer culture (Ong, 2006). In this way, to like is no longer to feel. Whether consciously or not, the act of liking on the web is the act of demonstrating an ontological stance of a neoliberal acting self as a social consumer.
Andrea Baker (@andee), “Comparing Online Communities: Norms, Structures and Processes of Two Groups of Music Fans”
Using dimensions of community from traditional online definitions and newer conceptions of internet researchers (see, e.g., Fernback, 2007, Katz, Rice, et al., 2004, Orgad, 2005), this paper will articulate features of online communities using data from an ethnographic study of rock music fan groups. It will contribute to theories of online communities by comparing two groups devoted to the same band, analyzing both their commonalities and differences, with focus on where they diverge.
With data from 101 semi-structured interviews, and observation of sites for three years, the author compares two groups of Rolling Stone fans in how they embody principles of community. Other communities of Stones fans were observed more informally. These basic components of community include: (1) emotional bonding of members (see Rheingold, 1993), (2) traditions and a sense of history through ritual, (3) common goals and identity, and (4) formal and informal norms of interaction.
The two groups differ in size and physical location of their members. “You Got me Rocking” (YGMR)* is larger and has a more European focus, with over half its members residing in Europe, the UK or Scandinavia. “Shattered” is smaller, with most of its fans from the US and Canada. Size and the distance members live from each other make a difference in how many meetings people have offline. Rarely a problem in North America, there is also the language issue among European residents when travelling between countries, although many speak English or French.
From participant/observation in the two communities and the interview data, the research finds variation in the degree of cohesiveness of the two communities related to not only the major components, but also to attributes found within the processes of interaction among members of the groups. Connected to differences in the four core components, the research finds divergences in online actions and technology that make one of the groups more of a true community than the other. These factors are (a) frequency of meetings offline and their group visibility, (b) temperaments of leaders and their styles of leadership, (c) type of topics posted in the discussion areas, and (d) software components on the site. The factors found in comparing the communities contribute to their basic elements, or the strength of traditions and rituals, emotional bonding, common goals and evolving norms of interaction.
After detailing how the differences in the factors manifest themselves in online and offline structures and processes, the paper concludes with further suggestions for conceptual dimensions to use in comparing online communities, and in contrasting these to social network sites (see boyd and Ellison, 2001). These will aid future researchers in determining whether online groups have strong or weak ties, and in assessing if they fit either the community or networking rubric, giving scholars a common vocabulary to compare case studies across categories. The identified aspects of online community also contribute to the growing literature outlining similarities and differences between groups and relationships in cyberspace and in those offline.
*The names of the groups are pseudonyms, derived from song titles, as are the real names of sites under study.
Meghan Rosatelli, “Digital Emotions: An approachable approach”
Embodiment theories, culture, and digital futures are each critical gateways into our understanding of emotion in digital space, but so far they have only been addressed in a very limited cultural scope through an even more limited lens of cognitive science. An accessible, inclusive framework for understanding emotions in digital space does not exist, and this absence in the midst of such dramatic changes to our communicative tools is disconcerting. We are only going to continue emoting in digital space, and as our emotions lead to actions with consequences we should be aware of these changes in both the technology and ourselves. Many questions arise from this problem: What does it mean to emote in digital space? Could this new environment and our interaction with (or our becoming) change who we are? (A twenty-first century human with a new emotional life? A new communal paradigm scenario?) What is lost or gained when we emote in digital space? How can we talk about emotions in digital space in a way that makes sense to the millions of people who are engaging in digital communication? The answers to these questions are vital to understanding shifting norms and behaviors as technology becomes more ubiquitous. Furthermore, the changing popular culture provides a good barometer for the future of emotions in digital space. Matching our understanding of science with the popular culture gives a more realistic understanding of the world and our ability to change it (or be changed by it). Right now, we are living an old conception of self that is no longer relevant in the twenty-first century. The theories that we have to work with are incredibly opaque and the science is truly in its infancy.
The science of emotions and the construction of self continue to rage on, luckily for us, as new technologies widen the view into our bodies and minds. What embodiment theories of emotions share with many other emotion theories, such as appraisal theories and cognitive theories, is the understanding that what we call “self” is plastic. We are changeable; sometimes consciously and many time unconsciously we shape to fit our world. Children born in the past fifteen years are growing up in a digital world that is radically different from our own childhood, and this world is changing the way their brains are wired. Heavy media multitaskers are more sensitive to distracting stimuli, and they use procedural memory (habit memory) more so than declarative memory (typically used in critical thinking). Our “status update” world is rewriting our brains to react to short bursts of information constantly, instead of sustained, in-depth communication. I believe emotions lie at the heart of this shift between extended communication and short bursts of information because truncated communication, whether textual or visual, requires heightened emotive power to convey a state of being and inspire a response or behavior. Digital emotions are the embodied feedback of these short communiqués. I will present my framework of digital emotions, which suggests that emotional experiences that are facilitated by digital space and/or digital technologies are unique because of the intimate feedback that occurs between digital environments and our bodies. This feedback alters emotional experiences based on interactions with media, the community of users, and/or the aesthetic experience. Working separately, in tandem, or all at once, the media, users and experience both expand and limit our emotional repertoire through the ubiquity of emotion generating media and the redundancy of the media. The impact of such a broad range of emotional experiences in new, hybrid environments point to a shift in our understanding of the twenty-first century human by complicating our traditional understanding of community, empathy, and identity via face-to-face interactions.