Springe direkt zu Inhalt

Infrastructures of Feeling

The New Key Concepts in Affective Societies

The New Key Concepts in Affective Societies

Makhashvili, Ana; Lünenborg, Margreth

Social media platforms increasingly shape affective and emotional expressions in the public sphere through evolving digital and algorithmic infrastructures. Features like emoji reactions, filters, and interactive formats (e.g., duets on TikTok), along with algorithmic curation, modulate how users express emotions and relate to others in digital environments. In this contribution, we develop the concept of infrastructures of feeling to theorize how platforms shape digital publics. While platforms seek to govern and monetize affective practices, users remain embedded in broader cultural and social contexts. The result is a set of affective media practices shaped by digital environments but also reflecting wider societal discourses. Building on Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling” and Rebecca Coleman’s notion of “infra-structures of feeling,” we expand the concept beyond temporality to explore how relationality, intensity, and (dis)embodiment are mediated by both material (technological and algorithmic) and symbolic (sensorial and cultural) infrastructures. We illustrate this through analyses of social media posts on migration and abortion rights, emphasizing the emergent, fluid, and patterned ways in which digital technologies structure and are structured by collective feeling.

Title
Infrastructures of Feeling
Author
Makhashvili, Ana; Lünenborg, Margreth
Publisher
Routledge
Identifier
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003640813
Appeared in
The New Key Concepts of Affective Societies
Language
eng
Type
Text
Size or Duration
pp.159-167