AFFECTIVE MEDIA PRACTICES

Affective media practices describe media users’ emotion and affect-based reception of and engagement with different kinds of media. The concept encompasses an analytic approach to both the bodily dynamics of affecting and being affected between users and media technologies, as well as their subsequent discursive negotiation, reflection, and narration. The concept is rooted in an understanding of media not only as a means of communicating and mediating emotions and affects but also as actively producing feeling rules. These rules grant legitimacy to certain emotions, ways of feeling and public displays of feeling, while delegitimizing others or rendering them invisible. From a practice-theoretical perspective, we can assume that media users draw on the knowledge provided by media about appropriate feeling rules, which in turn shape the users’ media practices. This results in reciprocal processes of affecting that also include moments of change, rupture, and transformation. Consistent with a relational concept of affect, affective media practices describe those modes of affecting and being affected, and their bodily and discursive manifestations that arise in interactions between media users and producers, media content, and media technologies. 

The concept was empirically investigated with reference to publics’ affective engagement with TV shows by Lünenborg et al. As part of a study on the production and reception of reality TV, viewers of Germany’s Next Top Model were observed as they watched the show at home. This observation was documented on video and interviews were subsequently conducted. The study investigated how emotions and affects such as tension, disgust, enthusiasm, shame, anger, or outrage, which are produced in and through different aesthetic and discursive techniques of reality TV, are variously adopted, expressed, and embodied by the users (e.g., by ways of (pre-)enacting emotional expressions displayed on the show). In this way, the interaction with media and the associated circulation of affects between (human and media-technological) bodies can be analyzed as a mode of affective practice. The concept has also been discussed in relation to social media usage. Practices that arise in interaction between users, digital infrastructures and social media posts – such as liking, sharing or commenting – but also those that explicitly express and mobilize emotions and affects, such as trolling, cyberbullying or hate speech and online shaming, can be described as affective media practices.

Hochschild, A. R. (1979). Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure. American Journal of Sociology, 85(3), 551–575. 

Lünenborg, M. (2021). Soziale Medien, Emotionen und Affekte. In J.-H. Schmidt & M. Taddicken (Eds.), Handbuch Soziale Medien (pp. 1–18). Springer VS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-03895-3_24-1 

Lünenborg, M., Töpper, C., Suna, L., & Maier, T. (2021). Affektive Medienpraktiken. Emotionen, Körper, Zugehörigkeiten im Reality TV. Springer VS. 

Makhashvili, A. (2023). Hijacking Solidarity: Affective Networking of Far-Right Publics on Twitter. In Affective Formation of Publics (pp. 149–172). Routledge.