Affect and Social Media: International research seminar, hosted by the EmotionUX lab in the School of Arts and Digital Industries, University of East London.

Affect and Social Media: International research seminar, including book launch for Ellis and Tucker’s Social Psychology of Emotion published by Sage in March.

Hosted by the EmotionUX lab in the School of Arts and Digital Industries, University of East London.

Friday 27th Feb, 2015 at UEL’s Docklands Campus.

Programme

Meet 12.30 at Docklands Campus reception 1pm start!

In Room NB 2.05

Introduction Tony D. Sampson

Session 1 – 1.15-2.25

Sara Marino (University of Westminster): Performances, belongings, and displacements. How Italians use new media to narrate their diasporic experience.

Evgenia Theodotou (AMC, Greece): Social network in higher education: a case study investigating creativity in the Greek context.

Darren Ellis (University of East London): Social Media, Affect and Process

Jacob Johanssen (University of East London): Alienation and Affect on Facebook

Break for late lunch 2.25-3pm

Session 2 – 3-4.10pm

Greg Singh (University of Stirling): Social Media as a False-Self System

Tamara Shepherd (London School of Economics) Mobility, Sociality, and Affect: The Commodification of Intimacy through Branded Mobile Apps

Ian Tucker (University of East London) and Lewis Goodings (Roehampton): Digitally mediated distress: Bodies, affect and digital care.

Break for refreshments 4.10-4.40pm

Session 3 4.40-6.00pm John Carter McKnight and Adam Fish (Lancaster University): “Sensible” Borrowers: Class Narratives and the Manipulation of Affect in the Marketing of Alternative Finance

Anne Vermeulen (University of Antwerp): Feeling happy: adolescents’ emotion sharing on social media

Closing discussion chaired by Tony D. Sampson

Book Launch and Social Event 6.30-8pm To celebrate the imminent (Sage, March 2015) publication of Social Psychology of Emotion by Darren Ellis and Ian Tucker – we will have some chat, drinks and nibbles… Book info: http://www.uk.sagepub.com/books/Book239116?subject=K00&sortBy=defaultPubDate%20desc&fs=1

Presenter Biogs

Sara Marino, University of Westminster Dr. Sara Marino is Research Fellow at CREAM-Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster. Her main research interests include the digitalization of contemporary Italian Diaspora in UK, and more generally the impact of digital media (online communities, social networks, discussion forums and blogs) in the processes of integration/communication between migrant communities and receiving countries. She also writes on transnational cinema and diasporic audiences, with a specific focus on von Trier’s cinema and the representation of Otherness.

Anne Vermeulen, University of Antwerp Anne Vermeulen is master in Social-Economic Sciences (University of Antwerp, 2010) and master in Communication Studies: Strategic Communication (University of Antwerp, 2011). Since October 2011, she works as a PhD student and research and teaching assistant at the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Antwerp. She is a member of the research group MIOS. Anne’s main field of interest concerns the link between youngsters and ICT. For her PhD, she studies how youngsters share their (positive and negative) emotions with others; when and how do they use different communication modes (face-to-face and specific types of mediated communication) to share their emotions with strangers, friends and family?

Tamara Shepherd, London School of Economics and Political Science Tamara Shepherd is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her work looks at the feminist political economy of digital culture, especially in relation to social media, mobile technologies, and digital games. For more, please see http://tshepski.com/

John Carter McKnight, Lancaster University John Carter McKnight is a postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Sociology Lancaster University. His work, funded under a grant from the Research Councils UK Digital Economy Theme, examines how peer to peer digital lending and payment services present themselves as alternatives to mainstream banking practices through infrastructure, user experience, and marketing design, with a particular focus on the role of affective design and marketing in speaking to regional and class issues in promoting alternatives to high street banking.

Adam Fish, Lancaster University I am a social anthropologist of digital culture, business, and politics. I investigate the interface of economic and political power, cultural discourses and practices, and networked communication technologies. These interests coalesce into critical and ethnographic investigations into media industries and media activism. Based on my ethnographic research into media companies in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, I am presently writing a book about the corporate myths of media “democratization” and internet and television convergence. In my present project I am investigating the politics of information infrastructures through ethnographic fieldwork with cloud computing companies, peer-to-peer banks, and “internet freedom” activists.

Jacob Johanssen, University of East London Jacob Johanssen is a third year PhD student in psychosocial studies at the UEL. His research interests include psychoanalysis and media audience research, Freudian affect theory, as well as critical theory. Publications include the anthology ‘Cyborg Subjects: Discourses on Digital Culture’ (edited with Rambatan, 2013) and ‘Alienation and Digital Labour’ (with Krüger, 2014). His PhD thesis explores a psychoanalytic conception of the subject that is both theoretical and epistemological. The research involves interviews with viewers of ‘Embarrassing Bodies’ and explores their viewing practices and affective responses to the programme.

Greg Singh, University of Stirling Dr Greg Singh is Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Stirling, and is Programme Director of the Digital Media undergraduate programme. He has published widely on a number of subjects ranging from popular cinema, film theory and film-philosophy, and depth psychology, to representations of technology in television drama. He has published two monographs for Routledge (Film After Jung, 2009; Feeling Film: Authenticity, Affect and Popular Cinema, 2014). He is currently working on a book-length study for Routledge discussing psychosocial aspects of digital literacy and Web 2.0.

Ian Tucker, UEL Dr. Ian Tucker is Reader in Social Psychology at the University of East London. He has a long standing interest in the social psychological aspects of emotion and affect, which has theoretically informed empirical work in the areas of mental distress, social media and surveillance. He has conducted research for the Mental Health Foundation and EPSRC Communities and Culture Network+, and is currently working on a project exploring the impact of social media on psychological support in mental health communities. Ian has published numerous articles in the areas of mental health, space and place, embodiment, surveillance and social media.

Lewis Goodings, Roehampton Lewis Goodings has several years experience researching social media, which began with his PhD work on MySpace and its effects on identity, embodiment and space. He has worked on a number of projects looking at the intersections between technology and experience, for example, a  (Roehampton-funded) piece of research entitled ‘Transformative Publics: Social media and the production of bodies online’ which looked at the experience of ‘unwanted’ body-technical assemblages in social media. His interests focus on identifying the role of digital media in the production of communities defined by the way users feel connected, and how such feelings are dependent on the specific aspects of the online environment. More recently, he has been working on a EPSRC funded project with Dr Ian Tucker that is looking at how people use the social media site ‘Elefriends’.

Evgenia Theodotou, AMC in collaboration with University of East London Evgenia Theodotou is Programme Leader in Education Department in Metropolitan College (AMC), which in collaboration with University of East London offers Bachelors and Masters Degrees. She is a PhD candidate in the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in School of Early Childhood Education in the research area of “Literacy skills in the early years settings”. Her research activity involves technology enhanced learning, creativity, arts and literacy skills. She has participated in several research projects and published her research in international conferences, journals, edited books and monographs. She is the author of “When I play I learn… and I better understand” from Delta publications and of “Creativity in the contemporary era of ICT” from Kritiki publications. She is also the author of a series of children’s books which will be shortly available to public. She has a permanent column at “Anna Drouza boro.gr” under the action of “The academic answers your queries”.

Darren Ellis, UEL Darren Ellis is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in Psychosocial Studies at the University of East London. Darren has been interested in the ways that emotion, affect and feeling are experienced, expressed and constructed. These interests have influenced his writings on psychotherapy, the emotional disclosure paradigm, theorising police stop and search activity, surveillance studies, conspiracy theory studies, and understandings of social media interactivity. His forthcoming book (March 2015) is entitled ‘Social Psychology of Emotion’

pic above: Greg Dunn's neural painting

pic below: largest living organism in the world (a rizoma!!)

Social Media and Affect: Seminar @ University of East London (chaired by Tony D. Sampson) 27Feb2015

Rareș Iordache: An interview with Tony D. Sampson about Crowds vs publics, Ukraine vs Russia, the Gaza crisis, the contagion theory and netica – a dialogue with Tony D. Sampson @ #hibridmedia Magazine, 19Aug2014

Rareș Iordache: Crowds vs publics, Ukraine vs Russia, the Gaza crisis, the contagion theory and netica – a dialogue with Tony D. Sampson (19Aug2014)

@ #hibridmedia Magazine + Read more

Crowds vs publics, Ukraine vs Russia, the Gaza crisis, the contagions and the anomalous objects in cyberspace, netica/ (n)ethics or a kind of ethics of information and the viral phenomena. All these are provocative themes for discussion. #hibridmedia magazine gives you all these in one fantastic dialogue with Tony D. Sampson. 

Rareș Iordache: After EuroMaidan to the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. This event increased his covering and it transformed into a genuine war. When I think at EuroMaidan I make a comparison with Indignados, the protests in Spain. There are several distinctions, but the contagions and their spreading caught my attention. Tell me, what do you think that were the contagious objects in this case? Another interesting thing is epidemiography, a term used by John Postill. This one is also in connection with viral phenomena and the contagious objects.

Tony D. Sampson: What is the difference between Spain and Ukraine? What tips the contagiousness of one protest into revolution and civil war while the other fizzles out? Although there have been analogous patterns emerging in recent years – beautifully portrayed in John Beieler’s big data application (despite its obvious weaknesses) – I’m not sure there’s one concrete object or set of viral objects determining what goes viral.

In Virality I asked what we might learn from Gabriel Tarde. In terms of revolution we need to look beneath the spreading of mere belief systems (ideologies) to how desires are given release or inhibited by invention. The object of desire is always belief; meaning that the biological and social mingle at the point where desires are appropriated by social inventions. We perhaps need to think through the interwoven relations established here between the desire for change and inventions of old hierarchies, revolutionary crowds, mobs, mass protests alongside mediated publics and electronic networks.

Tarde’s proto-media theory also provides us with a familiar distinction between publics and crowds. Crowds have been progressively usurped by mediated publics. On one hand, crowds have something of the animal about them. They are not easily led. If you want to win a revolution you probably need an animal on your side. On the other hand, the new publics are appear to be better informed by the new media, but are in fact more easily controlled; mainly as a result of the distances the increasingly mediated flows of information open up between connected subjects. There is, I suppose, less need to join a crowd as a source of information. This marks the beginning of press baron power and manufactured mass audiences.

Old crowd theories suggested that the violent irrationality of crowd power was just about enough to prevail over old aristocratic hierarchies. Prevailing revolutionary movements have historically relied on some level of violence – the muscle of the mob; usually spilling out of the poorer neighbourhoods and storming the palaces.

So what difference can a network make? Take Beieler’s protest map again. A tipping point may well correspond with the wide-scale uptake of the Internet. Indeed, there are echoes of crowd theory evident in some of the popular ideas about network contagions today. The BBC broadcast a documentary a couple of year’s back fundamentally claiming that Facebook caused the Arab Spring. Governments take these claims seriously too. They see social media as a threat.

But is a network like a crowd? Things are complex. There are networks in crowds and crowds in networks, but a network only seems to have revolutionary potential if it can tap into the violence of an actual crowd; a crowd prepared to put its life on the line for the cause. Indeed, I am growing a little sceptical about the threat posed by social media. The problem for protesters in most western European countries is that they are still countered by a docile public led by corporate media and bourgeois politicians. When the students got out of hand during the fees protests in the UK most of the public seemed to turn against them, welcoming their suppression. Others remained blissfully distracted by their diet of celebrity gossip, football transfers, and TV talent shows.

Social media provides an alternative; it acts as a vent for protest, of course. It has an influence on discursive formations and interacts with the actions of crowds. But it’s a distraction too. The extreme police violence played a role in the demise of the student movement, but they didn’t close down their accounts. The stuff that generally trends on these networks does not appropriate the desire for political change, but rather indulgences a craving for joyful encounters – entertainment, sex, love, scandal, and fun, or as Olga Goriunova argues, utter idiocy. Perhaps there’s revolutionary potential in this stuff, but how that works I’m not sure. For every FB posting encouraging action on the streets there seems to be thousands of stupid cat pictures.

It’s also important to note that contagions are not inherently radical. Contagions can be very conservative. As Barbara Ehrenreich points out, the only English ‘revolution’ was founded on the spreading of a Calvinist belief system that opposed the kind of festivities and carnivals that we might usually associate with the animality of radical protests. As Beieler’s map problematically illustrates the contagion could be an Occupy or Tea Party protest…

Perhaps networks are a hybrid crowd-public or ersatz crowds that lack the animality of actual crowds. We cannot storm the Bastille with tweets alone! The crowd needs to become the brutal muscle that intertwines with network sloganing.
So yes, any attempt to produce epidemiographs of protest movements studying the interaction between network and crowd is very welcome.

R.I.: I try to establish a triad between media – archaeology, cyber-intelligence and philosophy of information. We can start this discussion from the particular case of network archaeology. At this moment, beside the impact of flow information and of his transgression, I can talk about a kind of ethics of information. In fact, how we use the information in cyberspace. This issue will give his quality. We are able to set up a balance between the quantity and the quality of information via Luciano Floridi. I define this ethics as (n)ethics because all is about his functionality. In reality, Netica is a software program developed by Norsys Software Corporation. Its purpose is to make a network more intelligible to us. Everything relies on a set of algorithms. So, what are your first thoughts about this triad and his rethinking based on (n)ethics?

T.D.S.: Media archaeology is very appealing; not least because it helps us to think up ways by which we can rummage through the archives of media invention without placing the constraints of a discipline on the researcher. As Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka put it, media archaeology needs to go against the grain of almost everything. It’s a nomad. So I think any attempt to triangulate it needs to keep this in mind. If it’s to work well then the archaeology needs to perhaps loosen up the ethics. 

This is what Parikka’s mapping of noise and Genosko’s fairly recent book on communication theory do. Most technical histories of Shannon and Weaver regard them as having brought noise under control, but there is of course an archive of accidents captured in, for example, collections of computer viruses and glitch music. So perhaps one ethical stance would be, in this case, a treatment of noise not simply grasped as the enemy of information, but something that has communicative potential beyond fixed ethical positions.

Netica looks like a fascinating example for media archaeology. Thanks for pointing it out. It would be really interesting to know how Bayesian networks integrate noise in logical circuits of a belief diagrams. For my part I’d also be interested in the extent to which these predominantly cognitive decision-making diagrams cope with the emotions, feelings and affects involved in reasoning? Is there a line of flight between Netica type programs and the concerted effort to integrate emotions into machine learning? I assume there is.

R.I.: The conflicts between Israel and Gaza. Any discussion about this event is a viral phenomenon, it is clear, and it is a form of manipulation. An informational one. Where are the affections, where are the contagious or viral objects?

T.D.S.: What kind of viral phenomenon is this? There is a swelling of the protest movement resulting from emotional engagement with this horror. There is a crowd forming. The death of innocent people, many of who are children, will act as a powerful emotional contagion. We can barely dare to watch this cruelty unfold. But what influence are these protests having on governments? There were a million stop the war protesters before the invasion of Iraq. I can only think that the hitherto failure of the government here to halt arms sales or more strongly condemn Israel’s asymmetric slaughter of innocents exhibits a kind of political autism at the heart of the establishment here. To prioritize arms sales and support the blockade of Gaza in favour of this slaughter is obscene.

The most effective contagion will most likely be the spreading of revenge in the Middle East for the death of so many innocents. The actions of the IDF and their arms suppliers in the west are producing an epidemic of avengers. This will be a crowd that will be willing to put its life on the line. It will be networked too.

R.I.: You wrote Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks, a book which transposes the virality in the social field. You rethink Tarde’s ideas mixing this spectrum with deleuzo-guattarian structures. It’s more than a Tardean recovering. Besides these influences, which is your theoretical support for your research?

T.D.S.: The project began with an interest in the potential of computer viruses – how these anomalous codes might provide an open alternative to the type of closed information spaces we find within proprietary software systems. In many ways that remained part of the focus, but it expanded outwards to look at virality in relation to social theory and the history of crowd theory in particular – moving through Tarde, Le Bon, Freud, Milgram, Deleuze and Guattari and ending up with network science, affective contagions and marketing. The open system of the viral electronic network was in some ways transposed to the openness of the contagious self-other relation of a more generalized social network. Instead of finding a new age of contagion, I found that contagion had always been there.

If I am to look back at it now and summarize I would say that the project’s main philosophical point was to collapse technological, social and biological distinctions. It tries desperately not to side with deterministic thinking. It focuses on the insensible degrees between conscious and nonconscious states, affective and representational states, volition and mechanical habit… I’m not sure how successful that effort was though?

R.I.: You are in connexion with Romanian project Bureau of Melodramatic Research? What do you think about Romanians researchers and projects? 

T.D.S.: My visit to Bucharest was a fantastic experience – one of the best invites since publishing Virality. The discussions I had there with various people provided me with lots of new ideas about my next project on neuroculture. I still follow BMR’s work and was luckily enough to meet up with Alina and Florin in London last year. Indeed, one of the most valued books in my collection is their little pamphlet called End Pit. It’s a great read. Knowing that the project coincided with the protests in Turkey at the time makes it all the more fascinating. Protest art as interference or accident; a mixture of performance, affective art and politics.

R.I.: The cyberspace is filled with anomalies, contagious objects, viruses and viral phenomena/ objects. So, in this context, are media ecologies the most important things for our cyberspace? At the same time, what do you think about an ecology based on semantic web?

T.D.S.: Well, yes, it’s these objects, processes and inventions, as Matt Fuller argues, that make up the world, synthesize it, block it, and make new worlds available. To discount the anomaly from this world is senseless, as we argued in The Spam Book. There might be many attempts to introduce intruder detections and immunological nets, to weed out the weeds, but the potential of the anomaly to spill out and infect is always there.

I’m not sure about the semantic model of the web. I wonder how much of the anomalous will figure in automated machines reading of data? What threat does it pose to anonymity too? I suppose going back to what I have said already, it is the anomaly that might help actualize the network into a crowd; its becoming animal. The tendency is, it seems, to always drift toward a conservative stability founded on the fear of the other (human and nonhuman). What we need is nomadic novelty to take hold and deterritorialize these territories of prejudice.

R.I.: Tell me a few words about your current and future interests, research or writings.

T.D.S.: I’m on sabbatical at the moment working on a few projects. I’m writing a book on neuroculture. This will explore the rise of the neurosciences and the impact it has on nomadic thought through various essays on the brain in relation to control, work and art.

I’m also collaborating with various people. Along with the performance artist, Dean Todd, I’m developing on what I’m calling dystopian media theory. I’m also working with Jairo Lugo from University of Sheffield on a project that revisits Tardean media theory. We are interested in the extent to which the contagions of social media affect editorial decisions and content.

Dr Tony D. Sampson is a Reader in Digital Culture and Communications within the School of Arts and Digital Industries (ADI). Tony works with PhD, MA and UG students from across ADI on related projects, including the digital media design degrees, visual cultures and the fine arts doctorate programme. His teaching focuses on developing student research projects. Tony’s latest book on contagion theory uses the ideas of Gabriel Tarde, Gilles Deleuze and others to develop a contemporary alternative to the meme, encompassing digital, affective, financial, political and cultural contagions.

His current teaching and research interests explore aspects (and critiques) of human computer interaction (HCI) and subsequent trends toward a third paradigm (or post-Taylorist mode) of HCI, including user experience design, ubiquitous computing, and a focus on emotions, feelings and affect.

He is currently writing a new book (Neuroculture) in which he explores the “interferences” between brain function (as understood in the neurosciences), and philosophy, politics and culture. More

Nascita del populismo digitale. Masse, potere e postdemocrazia nel XXI secolo

 Nascita del populismo digitale è leggibile e scaricabile in formato PDF per lettori di ISSUU, iBook o e.book.

Il non-partito M5S guidato da Beppe Grillo e Gianroberto Casaleggio ha ottenuto alle elezioni nazionali del 24—25 Febbraio 2013 un clamoroso successo elettorale: il panorama della politica italiana ne è uscito profondamente sconvolto. Questo libro cerca di indagare le novità che caratterizzano la nascita di un nuovo fenomeno politico: il populismo digitale. Siamo all’inizio di un cambio epocale della politica governamentale e della democrazia rappresentativa come l’abbiamo conosciuta fino da oggi? Lontano dall’essere un’anomalia italiana, il populismo è un fenomeno saldamente occidentale, sia nella sua versione analogica, sia nella sua versione digitale, con una english version, l’UKIP, estremamente seducente e, per questo motivo, non meno pericolosa di altre formazioni anti-establishment di destra. Abbiamo formulato a intellettuali italiani e anglosassoni - di varia estrazione politica e differenti competenze disciplinari - sei domande riguardanti alcuni punti fondanti della nascita del populismo digitale e delle relazioni esistenti tra masse, potere e post-democrazia agli albori del XXI secolo. Ciò che leggerete in questo libro è il risultato delle nove interviste rilasciate tra maggio 2013 e febbraio 2014 da Luciana Parisi, Tiziana Terranova, Lapo Berti, Simon Choat, Paolo Godani, Saul Newman, Jussi Parikka, Tony D. Sampson e Alberto Toscano.

A cura di Obsolete Capitalism.