Affective Politics of Digital Media

Megan Boler is Professor in the Social Justice Education Department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on philosophy and politics of emotion; critical studies of affect, social media, and propaganda; and digital media practices within social movements. Her books include Feeling Power: Emotions and Education (1999), Democratic Dialogue in Education (2004), Digital Media and Democracy (2008), and DIY Citizenship (Ratto and Boler, 2014). Elizabeth Davis is a PhD candidate in the Social Justice Education Department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on histories and structures of feeling drawing on materialist, feminist, critical race, disability, media, and cultural studies approaches. Her articles can be found in Theory & Event, Emotion, Space and Society, and The Senses and Society.

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