Infrastructures of Feeling: Digital Mediation, Captivation, Ambivalence
Coleman, Rebecca – 2025
Rebecca Coleman proposes a concept of infrastructures of feeling, building on Raymond Williams’ work on structures of feeling and contributing to current work on digital media/tion, affect and time.
This paper proposes a concept of infrastructures of feeling, building on Raymond Williams’ work on structures of feeling and contributing to current work on digital media/tion, affect and time. It draws on empirical research conducted over the past decade on these themes, including art-making workshops with young people and interviews with digital media professionals. In the first part of the paper, Coleman introduces the concept of infrastructures of feeling and what it might offer to understandings of the contem-porary period. In the second part, the author develops its affective and temporal dimensions. She suggests that today’s digitally mediated feelings are non-unified, contested, ambiguous and ambivalent and that they indicate a condition of middleness, or being in midst of form/ation and transformation. In the third part, Coleman considers some of the implications of this argument for cultural politics, including for rethinking distance/ resence and what resistance might look and feel like.