From Irony to Solidarity: Affective Practice and Social Media Activism

This article discusses affective practice in context of social media activism. Drawing on work by Margaret Wetherell the article explores particular sensibility of political discourse and action, enhanced by the social media environment. The empirical cases involve the social media activism of anti-immigrant movement as well as solidarity activists in the context of the so called refugee crisis in Europe. It is argued that practices and sensibilities of activism enhanced and shaped by the technologies and economics of social media. While the anti-immigrant movement makes use of politics of irony on various levels from discourse to acts of trolling, solidarity movements tend to focus on compassionate, yet increasingly practical and shielded forms of practices as well as commercialized. Finally it introduces solidarity of dissonance as an opportunity for reflexive collective action and as a space to imagine alternatives

From irony to solidarity: affective practice and social media activism

This article discusses affective practice in context of social media activism. Drawing on work by Margaret Wetherell the article explores particular sensibility of political discourse and action, enhanced by the social media environment. The empirical cases involve the social media activism of anti-immigrant movement as well as solidarity activists in the context of the so called refugee crisis in Europe. It is argued that practices and sensibilities of activism enhanced and shaped by the technologies and economics of social media. While the anti-immigrant movement makes use of politics of irony on various levels from discourse to acts of trolling, solidarity movements tend to focus on compassionate, yet increasingly practical and shielded forms of practices as well as commercialized. Finally it introduces solidarity of dissonance as an opportunity for reflexive collective action and as a space to imagine alternatives

The humanitarian makeover

We examine how the makeover paradigm is mobilized in contemporary humanitarian communications—a practice we call “humanitarian makeover.” We demonstrate its operation in the Finnish television programme Arman and the Children of Cameroon and Plan's 2013 International Day of the Girl event. The analysis shows how helping distant others is configured within a makeover and self-transformation narrative, providing a stage for performance of an “ethical self.” We argue that while the humanitarian impetus is to disturb and redress global inequality and injustice, which includes exposing and interrupting the failures of neoliberalism, the makeover paradigm is intimately connected to and reinforces individualized “moral citizenship,” which conforms to and reinforces neoliberal values

Datakapitalismin uhka ja lumo

Timo Harakka. 2022. Datakapitalismi kriisien maailmassa. Helsinki: Siltala. 168 s