Full Description
This interdisciplinary, international collection examines how sophisticated digital practices and technologies exploit and capitalize on emotions, with particular focus on how social media are used to exacerbate social conflicts surrounding racism, misogyny, and nationalism.
Radically expanding the study of media and political communications, this book bridges humanities and social sciences to explore affective information economies, and how emotions are being weaponized within mediatized political landscapes. The chapters cover a wide range of topics: how clickbait, "fake news," and right-wing actors deploy and weaponize emotion; new theoretical directions for understanding affect, algorithms, and public spheres; and how the wedding of big data and behavioral science enables new frontiers of propaganda, as seen in the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal. The collection includes original interviews with luminary media scholars and journalists.
The book features contributions from established and emerging scholars of communications, media studies, affect theory, journalism, policy studies, gender studies, and critical race studies to address questions of concern to scholars, journalists, and students in these fields and beyond.
Contents
Introduction: Propaganda by Other Means Part I: Theorizing Media and Affect 1. Affect, Media, Movement: Interview with Susanna Paasonen and Zizi Papacharissi 2. Reverberation, Affect, and Digital Politics of Responsibility 3. "Fuck Your Feelings": The Affective Weaponization of Facts and Reason 4. Blockchain, Affect, and Digital Teleologies 5. Becoming Kind: A Political Affect for Post-Truth Times 6. Beyond Behaviorism and Black Boxes: The Future of Media Theory Interview with Wendy Chun, Warren Sack, and Sarah Sharma Part II: Affective Media, Social Media, and Journalism: New Relationships 7. Pioneering Countercultural Conservatism: Limbaugh, Drudge, and Breitbart 8. Breitbart's Attacks on Mainstream Media: Victories, Victimhood, and Vilification 9. Algorithmic Enclaves: Affective Politics and Algorithms in the Neoliberal Social Media Landscape 10. Hashtagging the Québec Mosque Shooting: Twitter Discourses of Resistance, Mourning, and Islamophobia 11. Hindu Nationalism, News Channels, and "Post-Truth" Twitter: A Case Study of "Love Jihad" 12. Computational Propaganda and the News: Journalists' Perceptions of the Effects of Digital Manipulation on Reporting Part III: Exploitation of Emotions in Digital Media: Propaganda and Profit 13. Empathic Media, Emotional AI, and the Optimization of Disinformation 14. The Heart's Content: The Emotional Turn at Upworthy 15. Empires of Feeling: Social Media and Emotive Politics 16. Nudging Interventions in Regulating the Digital Gangsters in an Era of Friction-Free Surveillance Capitalism 17. Digital Propaganda and Emotional Micro-Targeting: Interview with Jonathan Albright, Carole Cadwalladr, Paolo Gerbaudo, and Tamsin Shaw
