A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media

A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media is now in production with Polity. It will be published in the UK in early July 2020 and in the US in August.

Below is the blurb, contents and a collection of wonderful matter-flow illustrations and diagrams the artist Mikey B Georgeson produced for the book and our related collaboration at the Society for the Study of Affect Summer School in Lancaster PA this year. They will become part of an exhibit planned to coincide with the book’s launch in the summer.

The Blurb for A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media

Positing online users as ‘sleepwalkers’, Tony Sampson offers an original and compelling approach for understanding how social media platforms produce subjectivities.

Drawing on a wide range of theorists, including A.N. Whitehead and Gabriel Tarde, he provides tools to track his sleepwalker through the ‘dark refrain of social media’: a refrain that spreads through viral platform architectures with a staccato-like repetition of shock events, rumours, conspiracy, misinformation, big lies, search engine weaponization, data voids, populist strongmen, immune system failures, and far-right hate speech. Sampson’s sleepwalker is not a pre-programmed smartphone junkie, but a conceptual personae intended to dodge capture by data doubles and lookalikes. Sleepwalkers are neither asleep nor wide awake; they are a liminal experimentation in collective mimicry and self-other relationality. Their purpose is to stir up a new kind of community that emerges from the potentialities of revolutionary contagion.

At a time in which social media is influencing more people than ever, A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media is an important reference for students and scholars of media theory, digital media and social media.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Intro

1 Feeling Facts and Fakes

2 On the Viral Spectra of Somnambulism

Coda Christchurch; El Paso

3 The Virality of Experience Capitalism

Segue A Dark [Viral] Refrain

4 Immunity, Community and Contagion

5 Deeper Entanglements

Outro Disrupting the Dark Refrain

Notes

Index

Illustrations and Diagrams

Very pleased to say that our new A&SM book is published today. See the reviews and contents below…

Don’t forget to take part in our A&SM#4 conference and book launch in Nov (information and cfp here)

The book will also be available at the wonderful Capacious conference in August in Lancaster PA.

Cover

Affect and Social Media

Emotion, Mediation, Anxiety and Contagion

Edited by Tony Sampson, Stephen Maddison, and Darren Ellis

Part of the series Radical Cultural Studies

Publication Date: Jul 2018 (today!)

Reviews

Social media play an outsized role in our emotional lives. They continually modulate our moods and feelings. They transmit vague sensations that run through us like an infection or contagion. In order to take the measure of social media today, the essays in this volume combine empirical research with far-ranging speculation, offering us analyses that are at once surprising and disturbingly familiar.

Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University

Sampson, Ellis and Maddison’s collection is crucial to any understanding of contemporary digital culture. Bringing together many directions of affect theory, theorising across a radical plurality of sites, they skilfully hold on to a vital coherence through critical affect studies inspired by feminist and queer theory and by core contributors in the field (e.g. Clough, Gregg, Seigworth, Paasonen).

Kate O’Riordan, Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Sussex

This is a thought-provoking, occasionally scary, and thoroughly fascinating exploration into the complex networked intensities within which we operate. Spanning from pedagogy to pornography, and beyond, it comes with an international focus and a profoundly interdisciplinary analytical range that make it recommended reading for all interested in understanding the key role that social media plays is contemporary culture.

Susanna Paasonen, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Turku

Foreword by Gregory J. Seigworth xi

Introduction: On Affect, Social Media and Criticality by Tony D. Sampson, Darren Ellis and Stephen Maddison 1

Part I: Digital Emotion

Introduction to Part I by Helen Powell 13

1 Social Media, Emoticons and Process by Darren Ellis 18

2 Anticipating Affect: Trigger Warnings in a Mental Health Social Media Site by Lewis Goodings 26

3 Digitally Mediated Emotion: Simondon, Affectivity and Individuation by Ian Tucker 35

4 Visceral Data by Luke Stark 42

5 Psychophysiological Measures Associated with Affective States while Using Social Media by Maurizio Mauri 52

Part II: Mediated Connectivities, Immediacies & Intensities

Introduction to Part II by Jussi Parikka 65

6 Social Media and the Materialisation of the Affective Present by Rebecca Coleman 67

7 The Education of Feeling: Wearable Technology and Triggering Pedagogies by Alyssa D. Niccolini 76

8 Mediated Affect and Feminist Solidarity: Teens Using Twitter to Challenge “Rape Culture” in and Around School by Jessica Ringrose and Kaitlynn Mendes 85

Part III: Insecurity and Anxiety

Introduction to Part III by Darren Ellis and Stephen Maddison 99

9 Wupocalypse Now: Supertrolls and Other Risk Anxieties in Social Media Interactions by Greg Singh 101

10 Becoming User in Popular Culture by Zara Dinnen 113

11 YouTubeanxiety: Affect and Anxiety performance in UK Beauty vlogging by Sophie Bishop 122

12 Chemsex: Anatomy of a Sex Panic by Jamie Hakim 131

13 Designing Life? Affect and Gay Porn by Stephen Maddison 141

Part IV: Contagion: Image, Work, Politics and Control

Introduction to Part IV by Tony D. Sampson 153

14 The Mask of Ebola: Fear, Contagion, and Immunity by Yig ˘it Soncul 157

15 The Newsroom is No Longer a Safe Zone: Assessing the Affective Impact of Graphic User-generated Images on Journalists Working with Social Media by Stephen Jukes 168

16 Emotions, Social Media Communication and TV Debates by Morgane Kimmich 178

17 The Failed Utopias of Walden and Walden Two by Robert Wright 188

Index 199

About the Contributors 203