This paper develops the concept of digital atmosphere to analyse the affective power of social media to shape practices of care and support for people living with mental distress. Using contemporary accounts of affective atmospheres, the paper focuses on the impact/s on feelings of distress, support and care that unfold through digital atmospheres. The power of social media intersects with people's support and care seeking practices in multiple ways and not in a straightforward 'accessing/providing support' model. Indeed, we find that the caring relations that develop through social media often need caring for themselves (Schillmeier, 2014). The paper draws on online and interview data from a larger project investigating how practices of care and support are (re)configured in the mental health-related social media site Elefriends.

This paper explores the rise of social networking technology as instances of mediated communities. A dialectic between collectivity and place, resulting in the grounding of a shared sense of the past in a particular place, is at the base of all communities. In this sense community is, by its very definition, inherently 'mediated'. We reformulate the notion of a 'virtual community' to examine the particular modalities of mediation across interactions occurring on Myspace. Data from two separate conversational exchanges are taken from open access Myspace profiles. Drawing on an approach broadly informed by the principles of Discursive Psychology (DP), we examine how identity is constituted within interaction by drawing on symbolic resources. The significance of place and off establishing a delicate relationship between the on-line and off-line accomplishments is underlined. The paper develops the arguments of Benwell & Stokoe (2006) and Dixon & Durrheim (2000) to arrive at an account of 'place identity' as the central dynamic in mediated community.

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Social media are increasingly being recruited into care practices in mental health. This paper analyses how a major new mental health social media site (www.elefriends.org.uk) is used when trying to manage the impact of psychiatric medication on the body. Drawing on Henri Bergson's concept of affection, analysis shows that Elefriends is used at particular moments of reconfiguration (e.g. change in dosage and/or medication), periods of self-experimentation (when people tailor their regimen by altering prescriptions or ceasing medication) and when dealing with a present bodily concern (showing how members have a direct, immediate relationship with the site). In addition, analysis illustrates how users face having to structure their communication to try to avoid 'triggering' distress in others. The paper concludes by pointing to the need to focus on the multiple emerging relationships between bodies and social media in mental health due to the ways the latter are becoming increasingly prominent technologies through which to experience the body when distressed.

Social media's networked form of communication provides people with bodies that are combinations of embodied and technologically-mediated action. This creates multiple forms of visibility within the infospheres (Terranova, 2004) of social media, which require simultaneous production of bodies in and through offline and online spaces. Bergson's non-dualistic model of bodies as images addresses the challenges of experiencing 'bodies online'; understood as expressions that blur the subject-object and representation-being dualisms. This paper explores how socially mediated bodies are disposed for action in ways that involve negotiating communication through the mediated noise (Serres) of social media, along with managing bodies that are faced with the spatialisation of time through new features such as Facebook Timeline.