Edited by Anne Fleig and Christian von Scheve, Public Spheres of Resonance: Constellations of Affect and Language, is out with Routledge. It has a fabulous lineup, from Anna Gibbs to Britta Timm Knudsen and Ann Cvetkovich. And me! My contribution is titled “Resonant Networks: On Affect and Social Media” and, well, asks how the concept of resonance may work in studies of social media. This is the intro/abstract:
In an era of clickbait journalism, Twitter storms, and viral social media campaigns varying from social protest to commodity promotion, it has become strikingly clear that networked communications are not merely about critical rational exchange or functional information retrieval, but equally – and perhaps even more explicitly – an issue of affective exchanges and connections of both the fleeting and more lasting kind. As argued in this chapter, the notion of affective resonance provides a means of accounting for encounters with the world in which bodies move from one state to another, and possibly become transformed in the process. This conceptualization is hardly specific to online phenomena as such, and it is used here to explore affective encounters between people, networks, interfaces, apps, devices, digital images, sounds, and texts in the context of social media. Moving from my own considerations of resonance in connection with online pornography to examinations of the role, both pronounced and not, that affect has played in Internet research, this chapter asks how affect matters and makes things matter in a contemporary media landscape driven by the quests for attention, viral circulation, and affective stickiness.
Susanna Paasonen 