Abstract
Recent scholarship demonstrates increasing interest in the emotions as drivers of news sharing and virality in digital environments. To understand how emotions unfold in the network society, this chapter offers a conceptual framework articulated on three levels. First, at the macro level, it explores the phenomenon of mediatisation and sharing culture. Secondly, on the meso level, it examines the digital space, configured around platforms, which condition emotional expression and favour the emergence of “affective publics.” Finally, at the micro level, it presents social interactions in the digital sphere from the user perspective, where the combination of psychological motivation and certain content features mobilise the emotions, which can then give rise to said content going viral.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adolf, Marian T. 2017. The Identity of Mediatization: Theorizing a Dynamic Field. In Dynamics Of Mediatization: Institutional Change and Everyday Transformations in a Digital Age, ed. O. Driessens, G. Bolin, A. Hepp, and S. Hjarvard, 11–33. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Alhabash, Saleem, and Anna R. McAlister. 2015. Redefining Virality in Less Broad Strokes: Predicting Viral Behavioral Intentions from Motivations and Uses of Facebook and Twitter. New Media & Society 17: 1317–1339.
Alhabash, Saleem, Jong-hwan Baek, Carie Cunningham, and Amy Hagerstrom. 2015. To Comment or Not to Comment?: How Virality, Arousal Level, and Commenting Behavior on YouTube Videos Affect Civic Behavioral Intentions. Computers in Human Behavior 51: 520–531.
Al-Rawi, Ahmed. 2019. Viral News on Social Media. Digital Journalism 7 (1): 63–79.
Alter, Adam. 2017. Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. New York: Penguin Press.
Altheide, David L., and Robert P. Snow. 1979. Media Logic. Beverly Hills: Sage.
Bandura, Albert. 1986. Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Batson, C. Daniel, Laura Shaw, and Kathrin Oleson. 1992. Differentiating Affect, Mood, and Emotion: Toward Functionally Based Conceptual Distinctions. Personality and Social Psychology Review 13: 294–326.
Berger, Jonah. 2011. Arousal Increases Social Transmission of Information. Psychological Science 22 (7): 891–893.
Berger, Jonah. 2013. Contagious: Why Things Catch On. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Berger, Jonah. 2014. Word of Mouth and Interpersonal Communication: A Review and Directions for Future Research. Journal of Consumer Psychology 24: 586–607.
Berger, Jonah, and Katherine L. Milkman. 2012. What Makes Online Content Viral? Journal of Marketing Research 49 (2): 192–205.
Bossetta, Michael. 2018. The Digital Architectures of Social Media: Comparing Political Campaigning on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat in the 2016 U.S. Election. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 95 (2): 471–496.
Boulianne, Shelley. 2015. Social Media Use and Participation: A Meta-Analysis of Current Research. Information, Communication & Society 18 (5): 524–538.
boyd, danah. 2010. Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications. In A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, ed. Z. Papacharissi, 39–58. New York: Routledge.
Bucher, Taina, and Anne Helmond. 2018. The Affordances of Social Media Platforms. In The SAGE Handbook of Social Media, ed. J. Burgess, A. Marwick, and T. Poell, 233–253. London and New York: Sage.
Cappella, Joseph N., Hyun S. Kim, and Dolores Albarracín. 2015. Selection and Transmission Processes for Information in the Emerging Media Environment: Psychological Motives and Message Characteristics. Media Psychology 18 (3): 396–424.
Casero-Ripollés, Andreu. 2018. Research on Political Information and Social Media: Key Points and Challenges for the Future. El Profesional de La Información 27 (5): 964–974.
Castells, Manuel. 2009. Communication Power. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Chadwick, Andrew. 2013. The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chouliaraki, Lilie. 2012. The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Christensen, Christa L. 2016. The Mediatization of Health Expertise: Health Programmes on Danish Public Service Television. Critical Studies in Television 11 (2): 204–216.
Christensen, Dorthe R., and Stine Gotved. 2015. Online Memorial Culture: An Introduction. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 21 (1–2): 1–9.
Clough, Patricia T., and Jean Halley. 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham: Duke University Press.
Coromina, Oscar, Emili Prado, and Adrián Padilla. 2018. The Grammatization of Emotions on Facebook in the Elections to the Parliament of Catalonia 2017. El Profesional de La Información 27 (5): 1004–1011.
Costera Meijer, Irene, and Tim Groot Kormelink. 2015. Checking, Sharing, Clicking and Linking: Changing Patterns of News Use Between 2004 and 2014. Digital Journalism 3 (5): 664–679.
Couldry, Nick, and Ulises A. Mejias. 2018. Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject. Television & New Media 20: 1–14.
Dafonte, Alberto. 2014. The Key Elements of Viral Advertising. From Motivation to Emotion in the Most Shared Videos. Comunicar 43: 199–207.
Davenport, Thomas H., and John C. Beck. 2001. The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Döveling, Katrin, Anu A. Harju, and Denise Sommer. 2018. From Mediatized Emotion to Digital Affect Cultures: New Technologies and Global Flows of Emotion. Social Media + Society 4 (January–March): 1–11.
Eckler, Petya, and Paul D. Bolls. 2011. Spreading the Virus: Emotional Tone of Viral Advertising and Its Effect on Forwarding Intention and Attitudes. Journal of Interactive Advertising 11 (2): 1–11.
Esser, Frank. 2013. Mediatization as a Challenge: Media Logic Versus Political Logic. In Democracy in the Age of Globalization and Mediatization, ed. H. Kriesi et al., 155–176. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Esser, Frank, and Jesper Stromback. 2014. Mediatization of Politics: Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Evans, Sandra K., Katie E. Pearce, Jessica Vitak, and Jeffrey W. Treem. 2017. Explicating Affordances: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Affordances in Communication Research. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 22: 35–52.
Feldman Barrett, Lisa, Michael Lewis, and Jeannette Haviland-Jones (eds.). 2018. Handbook of Emotions, 4th ed. New York: The Guilford.
Frandsen, Kirsten. 2014. Mediatization of Sports. In Mediatization of Communication, ed. K. Lundby, 525–546. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
García-Perdomo, Víctor, Ramón Salaverría, Danielle K. Kilgo, and Summer Harlow. 2018. To Share or Not to Share. Journalism Studies 19 (8): 1180–1201.
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra, and Cedric Deschrijver. 2018. Introduction to the Special Issue: The Social Mediatization of the Economy: Texts, Discourses, and Participation. Language@Internet 16 (1).
Gerbaudo, Paolo. 2012. Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. London: Pluto.
Gerbaudo, Paolo. 2016. Rousing the Facebook Crowd: Digital Enthusiasm and Emotional Contagion in the 2011 Protests in Egypt and Spain. International Journal of Communication 10: 254–273.
Giaxoglou, Korina, and Katrin Döveling. 2018. Mediatization of Emotion on Social Media: Forms and Norms in Digital Mourning Practices. Social Media + Society 4 (1): 1–4.
Giaxoglou, Korina, Katrin Döveling, and Stacey Pitsillides. 2017. Networked Emotions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Sharing Loss Online. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 61 (1): 1–10.
Gillespie, Tarleton. 2018. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Goldhaber, Michael. 1997. The Attention Economy and the Net. First Monday 2 (4–7) (April). https://firstmonday.org/article/view/519/440. Accessed March 18, 2018.
Gong, Wei, Ee-Peng Lim, and Feida Zhu. 2015. Characterizing Silent Users in Social Media Communities. In Proceedings of the Ninth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.
Groot Kormelink, Tim, and Irene Costera Meijer. 2018. What Clicks Actually Mean: Exploring Digital News User Practices. Journalism 19 (5): 668–683.
Harcup, Tony, and Deirdre O’Neill. 2017. What Is News? News Values Revisited (Again). Journalism Studies 18 (12): 1470–1488.
Heimbach, I., B. Schiller, T. Strufe, and O. Hinz. 2015. Content Virality on Online Social Networks: Empirical Evidence from Twitter, Facebook, and Google + on German News Websites. In Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext & Social Media, 39–47, New York: ACM.
Helmond, Anne. 2015. The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready. Social Media + Society 1 (July–December): 1–11.
Hepp, Andreas, Stig Hjarvard, and Knut Lundby. 2015. Mediatization: Theorizing the Interplay Between Media, Culture and Society. Media, Culture and Society 32 (2): 314–324.
Hjarvard, Stig. 2011. The Mediatization of Religion: Theorising Religion, Media and Social Change. Culture and Religion 12 (2): 119–135.
Hjarvard, Stig. 2017. Mediatization. In The International Encyclopedia of Media Effects, ed. P. Rössler, C.A. Hoffner, and L. Zoonen. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Hochschild, Arlie R. 1979. Emotion Work, Feeling Rules and Social Structure. The American Journal of Sociology 85: 551–575.
Hoffmann, Anna L., Nicholas Proferes, and Michael Zimmer. 2018. “Making the World More Open and Connected”: Mark Zuckerberg and the Discursive Construction of Facebook and Its Users. New Media & Society 20 (1): 199–218.
Holton, Avery E., Baek Kang, Coddington Mark, and Carolyn Yaschur. 2014. Seeking and Sharing: Motivations for Linking on Twitter. Communication Research Reports 31 (1): 33–40.
Hutchby, Ian. 2001. Conversation and Technology: From the Telephone to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity Press.
John, N.A. 2016. The Age of Sharing. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Karppi, Tero, Lotta Kähkönen, Mona Mannevuo, Mari Pajala, and Tanja Sihvonen. 2016. Affective Capitalism: Investments and Investigations. Ephemera 16 (4): 1–13.
Kim, Hyun Suk. 2015. Attracting Views and Going Viral: How Message Features and News-Sharing Channels Affect Health News Diffusion. Journal of Communication 65: 512–534.
Klinger, Ulrike, and Jakob Svensson. 2016. Network Media Logic: Some Conceptual Considerations. In Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics, ed. A. Bruns, G. Enli, E. Skogerbö, A. Larsson, and C. Christensen, 23–38. New York: Routledge.
Knobloch-Westerwick, Silvia, Benjamin K. Johnson, and Axel Westerwick. 2015. Confirmation Bias in Online Searches: Impacts of Selective Exposure Before an Election on Political Attitude Strength and Shifts. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 20: 171–187.
Kortti, Jukka. 2017. Media History and the Mediatization of Everyday Life. Media History 23 (1): 115–129.
Krämer, Benjamin. 2011. The Mediatization of Music as the Emergence and Transformation of Institutions: A Synthesis. International Journal of Communication 5: 471–491.
Kreiss, Daniel, Regina G. Lawrence, and Shannon C. McGregor. 2018. In Their Own Words: Political Practitioner Accounts of Candidates, Audiences, Affordances, Genres, and Timing in Strategic Social Media Use. Political Communication 35 (1): 8–31.
Krotz, Friedrich. 2007. The Meta-Process of ‘Mediatization’ as a Conceptual Frame. Global Media and Communication 3 (3): 256–260.
Kümpel, Anna S., Veronika Karnowski, and Till Keyling. 2015. News Sharing in Social Media: A Review of Current Research on News Sharing Users, Content, and Networks. Social Media + Society (July–December): 1–14.
Kwahk, Kee Y., and Do-Hyung Park. 2016. The Effects of Network Sharing on Knowledge-Sharing Activities and Job Performance in Enterprise Social Media Environments. Computers in Human Behavior 55: 826–839.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lee, Chei Sian, and Long Ma. 2012. News Sharing in Social Media: The Effect of Gratifications and Prior Experience. Computers in Human Behavior 28: 331–339.
Li, Huaye, and Yasuaki Sakamoto. 2014. Social Impacts in Social Media: An Examination of Perceived Truthfulness and Sharing of Information. Computers in Human Behavior 41: 278–287.
Livingstone, Sonia. 2014. The Mediatization of Childhood and Education: Reflections on The Class. In Media Practice and Everyday Agency in Europe, ed. L. Kramp et al., 55–68. Bremen: Edition Lumière.
Ma, Long, Chei Sian Lee, and Dion Hoe-Lian Goh. 2011. That’s News to Me: The Influence of Perceived Gratifications and Personal Experience on News Sharing in Social Media. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual International ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, 141–144. New York, NY: ACM.
Ma, Long, Chei Sian Lee, and Dion Hoe-Lian Goh. 2014. Understanding News Sharing in Social Media: An Explanation from the Diffusion of Innovations Theory. Online Information Review 38 (5): 598–615.
McCarthy, E. Doyle. 1994. The Social Construction of Emotions: New Directions from Culture Theory. In Social Perspectives on Emotion, vol. 2, ed. W.M. Wentworth and J. Ryan, 267–279. Bingley: Emerald.
Moritz, Sandra E., Deborah L. Feltz, Kyle R. Fahrbach, and Diane E. Mack. 2000. The Relation of Self-Efficacy Measures to Sport Performance: A Meta-Analytic Review. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 71 (3): 280–294.
Nelson-Field, Karen, Erika Riebe, and Kellie Newstead. 2013. The Emotions That Drive Viral Video. Australasian Marketing Journal 21: 205–211.
Newman, Nic, Richard Fletcher, Antonis Kalogeropoulos, David A. Levy, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. 2018. Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2018. Oxford Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. http://media.digitalnewsreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/digital-news-report-2018.pdf?x89475. Accessed March 12, 2019.
Nielsen, Rasmus K., and Sarah A. Ganter. 2018. Dealing with Digital Intermediaries: A Case Study of the Relations Between Publishers and Platforms. New Media & Society 20 (4): 1600–1617.
Oliveira, Thaiane M. 2018. Mediatization of Science: Reconfigurations of the Paradigm of Scientific Communication and Academic Labour in Digital Era. MATRIZes 12 (3): 101–126.
Pamment, James. 2014. The Mediatization of Diplomacy. Hague Journal of Diplomacy 9: 253–280.
Papacharissi, Zizi. 2015. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peyton, Tamara. 2014. Emotion to Action?: Deconstructing the Ontological Politics of the “Like” Button. In Internet and Emotions, ed. T. Benski and E. Fisher, 113–128. New York: Routledge.
Picone, Ike, Ralf De Wolf, and Sarie Robijt. 2016. Who Shares What with Whom and Why? News Sharing Profiles Amongst Flemish News Users. Digital Journalism 4 (7): 921–932.
Reddy, William M. 2001. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rimé, Bernard. 2009. Emotion Elicits the Social Sharing of Emotion: Theory and Empirical Review. Emotion Review 1: 60–85.
Ritzer, George, and Nathan Jurgenson. 2010. Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital ‘Prosumer’. Journal of Consumer Culture 10 (1): 13–36.
Rosas, Omar V. 2015. The Emotional Framing of Terrorism in Online Media: The Case of Charlie Hebdo. In Therapy and Emotions in Film and Television: The Pulse of Our Times, ed. C. Wassmann, 134–152. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rosas, Omar V. 2018. Strategic Avoidance and Strategic Use: A Look into Spanish Online Journalist Attitudes Toward Emotions in Reporting. International Journal of Communications 12: 2113–2132.
Rosas, Omar V., and Javier Serrano-Puche. 2018. News Media and the Emotional Public Sphere—Introduction. International Journal of Communication 12: 2031–2039.
Scholz, Christin, Elisa C. Baeka, Matthew Brook O’Donnell, Suk Kim, Cappella Hyun, N. Joseph, and Emily B. Falka. 2017. A Neural Model of Valuation and Information Virality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114 (11): 2881–2886.
Shouse, Eric. 2005. Feeling, Emotion, Affect. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 8 (6). http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php. Accessed March 23, 2019.
Serrano-Puche, Javier. 2018. Affect and the Expression of Emotions on the Internet: An Overview of Current Research. In Second International Handbook of Internet Research, ed. J. Hunsinger, L. Klastrup, and M. Allen, 1–19. Dordrecht: Springer.
Slaby, Jan, and C. von Scheve (eds.). 2019. Affective Societies. New York: Routledge.
Stage, Carsen. 2017. Networked Cancer: Affect, Narrative and Measurement. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sumiala, Johanna, Minttu Tikka, Jukka Huhtamäki, and Katja Valaskivi. 2016. #JeSuisCharlie: Towards a Multi-Method Study of Hybrid Media Events. Media and Communication 4 (4): 97–108.
Švelch, Jaroslav, and Václav Štětka. 2016. The Coup That Flopped: Facebook as a Platform for Emotional Protest. First Monday 21 (1–4 January).
Tandoc, Edson C., and Bruno Takahashi. 2016. Log in If You Survived: Collective Coping on Social Media in the Aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. New Media and Society 19 (11): 1778–1793.
Valenzuela, Sebastian. 2013. Unpacking the Use of Social Media for Protest Behavior: The Roles of Information, Opinion Expression, and Activism. American Behavioral Scientist 57 (7): 920–942.
van Dijck, José. 2013. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. New York: Oxford University Press.
van Dijck, José, and Thomas Poell. 2013. Understanding Social Media Logic. Media and Communication 1 (1): 2–14.
van Dijck, José, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal. 2018. The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Vraga, Emily K., Ashley Anderson, John Kotcher, and Edward W. Maibach. 2015. Issue Specific Engagement: How Facebook Contributes to Opinion Leadership and Efficacy on Energy and Climate Issues. Journal of Information Technology and Politics 12 (2): 200–218.
Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin. 2018. The Emotional Architecture of Social Media. In Networked Self: Platforms, Stories, Connections, ed. Z. Papacharissi. New York: Routledge.
Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin. 2019. Emotions, Media and Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Wang, Susie, Corner Adam, Chapman Daniel, and Ezra Markowitz. 2018. Public Engagement with Climate Imagery in a Changing Digital landscape. WIREs Climate Change. 9: e509.
Webster, James G. 2014. The Marketplace of Attention. Cambridge: MIT Press.
West, Sarah Myers. 2019. Data Capitalism: Redefining the Logics of Surveillance and Privacy. Business and Society 58 (1): 20–41.
Wu, Tim. 2016. The Attention Merchants. New York: Vintage.
Zillmann, Dolf, and Hans-Bernd Brosius. 2000. Exemplification in Communication: The Influence of Case Reports on the Perception of Issues. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Zillmann, Dolf, Lei Chen, Silvia Knobloch, and Coy Callison. 2004. Effects of Lead Framing on Selective Exposure to Internet News Reports. Communication Research 31: 58–81.
Acknowledgements
This research received funding from the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarra and from the Program for Academic Personnel Advancement at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Serrano-Puche, J., Solís Rojas, L. (2019). Mediatised Emotions: A Framework for Understanding the Display of Affect in the Network Society. In: Fox, B. (eds) Emotions and Loneliness in a Networked Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24882-6_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24882-6_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-24881-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-24882-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)