Research on the processes of mediatization aims to explore the mutual shaping of media and social life and how new media technologies influence and infiltrate social practices and cultural life. We extend this discussion of media's role in transforming the everyday by including in the discussion the mediatization of emotion and discuss what we conceptualize as digital affect culture(s). We understand these as relational, contextual, globally emergent spaces in the digital environment where affective flows construct atmospheres of emotional and cultural belonging by way of emotional resonance and alignment. Approaching emotion as a cultural practice, in terms of affect, as something people do instead of have, we discuss how digital affect culture(s) traverse the digital terrains and construct pockets of culture-specific communities of affective practice. We draw on existing empirical research on digital memorial culture to empirically illustrate how digital affect culture manifests on micro, meso, and macro levels and elaborate on the constitutive characteristics of digital affect culture. We conclude with implications of this conceptualization for theoretical advancement and empirical research.

This article provides the theoretical background for this Special Issue which explores the mediatization of emotion on social media as attested in different digital mourning practices. The overview discusses the affective and emotional turn alongside the mediatic turn in relation to key trends and foci in the study of affect/emotion. Our discussion points to a shift in conceptualizations of affect/emotion from mediated to mediatized practice, embedded in other social practices and subject to media and social media logics, affordances, and frames, which are worthy of empirical investigation. The article also presents key insights offered in the four articles of this Special Issue and foregrounds current and future directions in the study of mediatization, emotional sharing, and digital mourning practices.

In an age of rising impact of online communication in social network sites (SNS), emotional interaction is neither limited nor restricted by time or space. Bereavement extends to the anonymity of cyberspace. What role does virtual interaction play in SNS in dealing with the basic human emotion of grief caused by the loss of a beloved person? The analysis laid out in this article provides answers in light of an interdisciplinary perspective on online bereavement. Relevant lines of research are scrutinized. After laying out the theoretical spectrum for the study, hypotheses based on a prior in-depth qualitative content analysis of 179 postings in three different German online bereavement platforms are proposed and scrutinized in a quantitative content analysis (2127 postings from 318 users). Emotion regulation patterns in SNS and similarities as well as differences in online bereavement of children, adolescents and adults are revealed. Large-scale quantitative findings into central motives, patterns, and restorative effects of online shared bereavement in regulating distress, fostering personal empowerment, and engendering meaning are presented. The article closes with implications for further analysis in memorialization practices.

Emotion has long been a contested concept and subject to different, often conflicting, definitions and approaches. Emotions have long been viewed in a reductionist way as solely biological components, as private components of the personality structure of an individual, or as entirely socially and culturally constructed. These views, that separate analytically different facets of emotion, reflect persisting dichotomies of human phenomena as nature vs. nurture, universality vs. culture-specificity, and private vs. public, which have served as the key organizing principles in Western science and humanities. Emotions, however, occupy a liminal space between divisions (Leavitt, 1996); they involve phenomena that are interactive and integrated with cognition (Izard, 2009), playing a key role in human development, in everyday social interaction, and in the organization of social and cultural life. Emotions are, then, to be understood as a not exclusively private object of inquiry (Zembylas, 2007). The study on emotion has received an enormous increase since the 1980s with a marked rise in psychological studies, and gradually engendering more insight from sociology, political science, anthropology, communication, and cultural studies, among others (Döveling, Scheve, & Konijn, 2011). Scholars seem to have reached consensus on the usefulness of the term "emotion" to refer to certain socially embedded psychobiological processes, even if they do not necessarily agree on how such processes cohere, or to what extent components such as arousal, feeling, appraisal, or facial expression can be given causal or definitional prominence (Beatty, 2013, p. 416). It is, however, agreed that emotions constitute Korina Giaxoglou (Ph.D., King's College London) is lecturer in English Language and Applied Linguistics at the Open University, UK. Her research interests include lamentation and cultural practices of death, dying and mourning, language and emotion, digital narrative, discourse circulation and (social) mediatization. Katrin Döveling (Ph.D., University of Erfurt) is professor of communication and media studies at Alpen-Adria-University of Klagenfurt. Her research interests are emotion research, empirical communication and media studies, mediatization, online communication, media psychology, and media sociology.

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