Thrilled to announce our new book just published by Routledge — (use code FLR40 for a 20% discount on purchase)!
from our Introduction:
Digital media has ushered in propaganda by other means—new strategies for mobilizing and capturing affect and emotion. How are feelings like fear, disgust, outrage, and resentment being used to capture attention, generate profits, manipulate political opinion, and influence election outcomes around the world? How have platforms and news agencies commodified our emotions to attract readers? How have “identity politics” become weaponized by right-wing actors to fuel racism, misogyny, and nationalism? How do we understand the extreme right turn in politics since 2016, and make sense of the fallout from ongoing Brexit events and Trump’s presidency? To answer these questions, this book expands the study of media and political communications, bridging humanities and social sciences to examine the affective weaponization of communications technologies.
Table of Contents
Preface by Jodi Dean
Introduction: Propaganda by Other Means, Megan Boler and Elizabeth Davis
Part I: Theorizing Media and Affect
Chapter 1: Affect, Media, Movement: Interview with Susanna Paasonen and Zizi Papacharissi
Chapter 2: Reverberation, Affect, and Digital Politics of Responsibility, Adi Kuntsman
Chapter 3: “Fuck Your Feelings”: The Affective Weaponization of Facts and Reason, Sun-ha Hong
Chapter 4: Blockchain, Affect, and Digital Teleologies, Olivier Jutel
Chapter 5: Becoming Kind: A Political Affect for Post-Truth Times, Ed Cohen
Chapter 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
Chapter 7: Pioneering Countercultural Conservatism: Limbaugh, Drudge, and Breitbart, Anthony Nadler
Chapter 8: Breitbart’s Attacks on Mainstream Media: Victories, Victimhood, and Vilification, Jason Roberts and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen
Chapter 9: Algorithmic Enclaves: Affective Politics and Algorithms in the Neoliberal Social Media Landscape, Merlyna Lim
Chapter 10: Hashtagging the Québec Mosque Shooting: Twitter Discourses of Resistance, Mourning and Islamophobia, Yasmin Jiwani and Ahmed Al-Rawi
Chapter 11: Hindu Nationalism, News Channels, and “Post-Truth” Twitter: A Case Study of “Love Jihad”, Zeinab Farokhi
Chapter 12: Computational Propaganda and the News: Journalists’ Perceptions of the Effects of Digital Manipulation on Reporting, Kerry Ann Carter Persen and Samuel C. Woolley
Part III: Exploitation of Emotions in Digital Media: Propaganda and Profit
Chapter 13: Empathic Media, Emotional AI, and the Optimization of Disinformation, Vian Bakir and Andrew McStay
Chapter 14: The Heart’s Content: The Emotional Turn at Upworthy, Robert Hunt
Chapter 15: Empires of Feeling: Social Media and Emotive Politics, Luke Stark
Chapter 16: Nudging Interventions in Regulating the Digital Gangsters in an Era of Friction-Free Surveillance Capitalism, Leslie Regan Shade
Chapter 17: Digital Propaganda and Emotional Micro-Targeting: Interview with Jonathan Albright, Carole Cadwalladr, Paolo Gerbaudo, and Tamsin Shaw