Feeling-Into the Civic Body: Affect, Emotions and Moods

Abstract

This chapter accounts for the energising role of affect, emotions and moods in circulating false information throughout the civic body. It starts by charting the trajectory of the role of feelings in understanding citizen-political communications. Their persuasive importance was recognised millennia ago and have been recognised anew in recent decades with the advent of neuroscience and the understanding that emotions are important for decisions and judgements. The chapter highlights three main mechanisms through which governments can try to manage public feeling and hence behaviour: discursive, decision-making based and datafied. It then considers the prevalent claim that we live in a post-truth condition (where appeals to emotion and personal belief are more influential in shaping public opinion than objective facts). While the relative importance of emotion and facts in everyday life is difficult to ascertain, the chapter demonstrates that the media from which people would normally derive their facts (namely, news media and social media) have become more emotionalised and affective, and suggests that we live in an informational environment that is sub-optimal for a healthy civic body. Finally, the chapter examines the challenges faced by governments in managing their population’s feelings during the COVID-19 pandemic where uncertainty, anxiety and false information proliferate.

Public Attitudes Towards Government Surveillance of Social Media in Australia

“…This paper has presented results from a survey designed to investigate Australian public attitudes towards government surveillance of public social media data for DNSLE purposes. The survey shows that, as in other studies, demographic characteristics such as age and voting preference are important in understanding support for surveillance practices (see Bakir et al 2015;Davis and Silver 2004;Degli Esposti, Ball, and Dibb 2021;Gurinskaya 2020;Huddy et al 2005;Trüdinger and Steckermeir 2017). This survey adds another dimension: the role of place of birth.…”

“…Trüdinger and Steckermeier's (2017) study of German attitudes towards surveillance found that acceptance rates varied according to what was being surveilled: the use of biometric data in documents (80%) versus the retention of telecommunications data (31%). Demographic characteristics such as gender (Gurinskaya 2020), age (Bakir et al 2015;Nam 2018), ethnicity (Bakir et al 2015), and education levels and internet usage (Trüdinger and Steckermeier 2017) affect attitudes towards surveillance. Acceptance of surveillance is correlated with participants' perception of benefits and risks (Gurinskaya 2020), particularly risks (Nam 2018), and with an individual's political ideology (Nam 2018).…”

“…These social imaginaries both influence and represent citizen ideas about what the state is for and how it does and should act. For example, attitudes to government surveillance have been found to be influenced by views of national security (Bakir et al 2015), citizens' trust in government institutions (Trüdinger and Steckermeier 2017), perceptions of police legitimacy (Gurinskaya 2020), and perceived transparency (Nam 2018). In recent work, Trüdinger and Ziller (2022) found that perceptions of government effectiveness in responding to threats were significant in determining citizen support for surveillance of communications, while Degli Esposti, Ball, and Dibb (2021) found that the perceived benevolence of security agencies was essential to citizen acceptability of state surveillance of communication technologies.…”