Week 9: What takes for the fire to continue?

In the Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics, Zizi Papacharissi made an argument that new media invite affective public to engage in current events, or stories. Papacharissi especially put emphasis on Twitter, a platform that provides a storytelling infrastructure. Papacharissi’s idea stemmed from an interesting thought that affect is not the opposite concept of ration. The premise provided better understanding of the affective public, and significance of studying the public’s behavior.

The author looked into ample amount of cases that Twitter has led a social movement, such as Arab Spring and Occupy movement. Papacharissi argued that Twitter provides a place for affective public to engage and form opinion as a group for the like-minded people. Although Papacharissi successfully made her case clear about the relationship between the affective public and the new media with successful case studies, some questions remain unsolved.

The question on affective public and the new media comes from the instant characteristic. Papacharissi argued feelings get public to engage in activities, and the engagement last even after the feelings go away. However, is this true? The affect and new media share the same characteristic, immediacy. Feelings are prompt and easy to evoke with a proper stimulus. Twitter provides a 140-character microblogging service, which was primarily developed for IM purposes. The instant microblogging media service is the right place to go for publics with aroused feelings of the moment. Take a look at what’s trending for instance. Twitter has a service called Trending, which keeps track of hashtags that is popular at the moment. The trending topics change as algorithm determines immediate popular stories. With the temperamental public and the rapidly swaying Twitter contents the fire can be easily put off. The only way that can continue the fire is if the traditional media take a part in.

The social media and affective public leads an event, but it takes traditional media and real live people to actually make a difference. Papacharissi used words such as possibilities and potentialities to define the word affect. Like the words used to describe affect, affective public only provide possibilities and potentialities for the current events on the new media to turn into the event on real life. Occupy movement or Arab Spring all started off as a social media movement, but eventually brought people out to the streets. Trending movement get traditional media coverage. Dr. Christofferson who came as a guest speaker in my last semester’s class said people are afraid of diseases that have the most news media coverage at the time. The diseases have always been around us, but people pay attention only when the television and the newspaper cover it. Likewise, the issues of Black lives matter, Occupy movement, Arab Spring, and Not our president have always been on the social media. But to continue the movement and led more people to aware of these problems calls for a cooperation of traditional media. When you look into the news stories on one of the big and successful social movements, the visuals provided are the pictures of actual protesters on the street. Media don’t just put screenshots of the most liked Tweet or posts as their visual aid because real live people speak more than a tweet. Thus, for a successful social movement, activists on social media should work on getting traditional media coverage, and they should be ready to get out to the real world when some crowd of likeminded people has gathered, and the right time has come.