Emotion, Digital Media, and Democracy

In this chapter, we make the case that in today’s societies, where public debate is shaped by digital and social media platforms, the role of emotion has become increasingly central. While media and communication studies may have come late to the “affective turn” across social sciences and humanities, recent years have seen the emergence of a critical mass of scholarship in the area. As this body of research has matured, it has demonstrated that the digital era offers no easy fixes to the challenges of democracy. Instead, it has created new opportunities and challenges. We develop the concept of “digital-emotional affordances”—to suggest the combined opportunities for action and participation presented by digital and social media and mediated emotionality can help to overcome journalism’s irrelevance and the divide between journalism and audiences, but at the same time risks creating new divides and disconnections.