Networked Emotions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Sharing Loss Online

Abstract

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.

Introduction

“…These range from sudden, unexpected events, such as death events, including terrorist attacks and celebrity death to specific socio-political crises, such as Brexit, which have attracted intense reactions from local and global publics. The connection between offline disruptive news events and their online reactions create affective publics (Papacharissi 2015), whose reactions -from condolences to solidarity or from sadness to anger -stem from their private spheres and are made public in social media (Giaxoglou et al 2017;Johansson 2017).…”

“…Despite a growing body of work on networked emotion (Benski and Fischer 2014;Giaxoglou et al 2017), there are still open questions about how emotion is used as a resource for participating to social life online and how such uses are related to processes of mediatization in social media. To address these questions, this collection of articles provides empirical perspectives into networked practices of emotion and stancetaking.…”

Affective Ties That Bind: Investigating the Affordances of Social Networking Sites for Commemoration of Traumatic Events

“…publicly or semipublicly bringing out emotions which formerly might have been privately shared into online spaces and collective experience (Giaxoglou, Döveling, & Pitsillides, 2017). The availability of virtual memorials and online grief support groups has assisted in the formation of various peer-to-peer associations among the individuals who mourn, remember, and honor the deceased (Arthur, 2009).…”

“…Social media technologies today support the building of virtual networks that are creating a new fashion for solidarity in the aftermath of disasters and mass traumas (Margolin & Liao, 2018). In networked mourning and commemoration, social media users communicate their feelings publicly or semipublicly bringing out emotions which formerly might have been privately shared into online spaces and collective experience (Giaxoglou, Döveling, & Pitsillides, 2017). The availability of virtual memorials and online grief support groups has assisted in the formation of various peer-to-peer associations among the individuals who mourn, remember, and honor the deceased (Arthur, 2009).…”

“…Scholarly work on networked emotions in digital cultures of participation and sharing, however, has not been keeping pace with these empirical observations (Giaxoglou et al, 2017). In this study, emotions were considered not only as private states individuated by SNS users’ expressive behavior but also as processes that arise from and affect their collective activities.…”