ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that exploring and understanding the powers of social media and digital culture more broadly require “feeling out” what’s actually happening in everyday lives. Feeling out social media is thus vital cultural work that can help us to tell compelling and new stories about the powers of digital culture – stories that complicate and deepen more prominent accounts of fake news, rampant consumerism, and mass surveillance. Ethnographic methods provide invaluable and necessary tools for accessing the digital mundane and the encounters between media and everyday life that happen there. Within media and cultural studies, there is a growing body of literature on affect and social media. As scholars move through this process, feeling out social media and attuning to ordinary affects and everyday media life, a fully cohesive story might not emerge. In sum, social media, and digital culture more broadly, are phenomena that, to be understood, must be felt out. For they are profoundly affective media.
