Two seemingly contradictory developments serve as starting points for this volume. First, technological innovations such as affective computing, mood tracking, sentiment analysis, and social robotics all share a focus on the recognition and modulation of human affectivity. Affect gets measured, calculated, controlled. Secondly, recent developments in politics, social media usage, and right-wing journalism have contributed to a conspicuous rise of hate speech, cybermobbing, public shaming, “felt truths,” and resentful populisms. In a very specific way, politics as well as power have become affective.

Affect gets mobilized, fomented, unleashed. When the ways we deal with our affectivity get unsettled in such a dramatic fashion, we have to rethink our ethical, aesthetical, political as well as legal regimes of affect organization.

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Lizenz: CC BY-SA 4.0

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14619/1655

Affective Transformations […] sets out to investigate the ways networked technologies modify our affects, feeling, and emotions. This is a welcome intervention as, in spite of the vastness of scholarship on both affect and digital media, speculative research that straddles their intersections remains surprisingly rare.

– Jernej Markelj in NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY

The collection is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the intersection of media theory, affect and new-materialism, as it provides timely theoretical concepts and discussions focusing on material interactions between bodies, technology and media.

– Ana Makhashvili on AFFECTIVE SOCIETIES