Open AccessAFFECTIVE DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND SOCIAL MEDIA: METHODOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS IN THE CROSS-PLATFORM STUDY OF EMOTION AND RACE ON TWITTER, GAB, AND FACEBOOK
Author(s) -
Megan Boler
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
selected papers of internet research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2162-3317
DOI - 10.5210/spir.v2021i0.11879
Subject(s) - social media , sociology , scholarship , narrative , affect (linguistics) , feeling , politics , context (archaeology) , social psychology , media studies , psychology , political science , paleontology , philosophy , linguistics , communication , law , biology
In the context of the so-called "post-truth" crisis, emotions haveresoundingly replaced facts in our fast-moving, affectively-driven internet-based culture.Scholars are challenged to develop innovative methods for studying emotion and affect withinstudies of social media, and political communications. What is an effectiveinterdisciplinary approach to the study of affect and communications in our rapidly-evolvingmedia ecosystems? While the "affective turn" makes sense in the humanities, disciplinesstudying elections and populist sentiments traditionally draw upon quantitative andqualitative methods that tend to reduce and measure emotions as simply negative andpositive. Further, political communications scholarship on "affective polarization" tend todefine "in-groups" and "out-groups" solely in terms of partisan differences, missing muchcomplexity of social identities and race relations. This three-year, funded research projectdraws from the politics of emotion to inform an innovative grounded theoretical study ofemotional expression related to narratives of racism in social media. draw on Sarah Ahmed'sconcepts of sticky emotions and affective economies (2004) and Arlie Hochschild's conceptsof feeling rules and deep stories (2016). This talk presents methodological innovations andresearch findings from our cross-platform digital ethnography of social media from Twitter,Gab, and Facebook, and qualitative discourse analysis of 1800 social media posts related toBlack Lives Matter and the Capitol Riots. The paper provides a significant contribution to anascent field of studies by specifically engaging an interdisciplinary theoretical frameworkthat includes affect theory or politics of emotion alongside qualitative research of socialmedia.