ABSTRACT
Citizens’ expressions on social media often revolve around affective and emotional engagements. This chapter discusses how the affective turn and affective citizenship shape contemporary citizens’ engagements, which in online environments may lead to particularised emotional practices and alignments. It shows how affect as an unactualised potential can be thought of as a precursor to more concrete, embodied emotional and cognitive processes. Both the rational and emotional are mutually intertwined dimensions within our information processing systems. Affective citizenship thus highlights how any engagement (political or not) entails a degree of affective investment, which through its expression can foster a collective dimension and aid a sense of belonging. Emotion can be seen as a social expression and thus as a social practice. In this respect, emotional repertoires are built collectively. As with any social structure, this entails a degree of normativity and power dynamics. On social media, affective proximity and emotional expressivity become means to overcome physical distance, boosting the importance of these affective dimensions. In practical terms, we will see how emotion is a vital part of visual processing and how seeing as doing images stimulate an emotional response based on internalised norms and values. This chapter also xxiaddresses how iconicity, achieved through familiarity, plays a role in emotional exchanges, highlighting the social dimension of affective communities.
