This paper develops the concept of digital atmosphere to analyse the affective power of social media to shape practices of care and support for people living with mental distress. Using contemporary accounts of affective atmospheres, the paper focuses on the impact/s on feelings of distress, support and care that unfold through digital atmospheres. The power of social media intersects with people's support and care seeking practices in multiple ways and not in a straightforward 'accessing/providing support' model. Indeed, we find that the caring relations that develop through social media often need caring for themselves (Schillmeier, 2014). The paper draws on online and interview data from a larger project investigating how practices of care and support are (re)configured in the mental health-related social media site Elefriends.
This paper explores the rise of social networking technology as instances of mediated communities. A dialectic between collectivity and place, resulting in the grounding of a shared sense of the past in a particular place, is at the base of all communities. In this sense community is, by its very definition, inherently 'mediated'. We reformulate the notion of a 'virtual community' to examine the particular modalities of mediation across interactions occurring on Myspace. Data from two separate conversational exchanges are taken from open access Myspace profiles. Drawing on an approach broadly informed by the principles of Discursive Psychology (DP), we examine how identity is constituted within interaction by drawing on symbolic resources. The significance of place and off establishing a delicate relationship between the on-line and off-line accomplishments is underlined. The paper develops the arguments of Benwell & Stokoe (2006) and Dixon & Durrheim (2000) to arrive at an account of 'place identity' as the central dynamic in mediated community.
Social media are increasingly being recruited into care practices in mental health. This paper analyses how a major new mental health social media site (www.elefriends.org.uk) is used when trying to manage the impact of psychiatric medication on the body. Drawing on Henri Bergson's concept of affection, analysis shows that Elefriends is used at particular moments of reconfiguration (e.g. change in dosage and/or medication), periods of self-experimentation (when people tailor their regimen by altering prescriptions or ceasing medication) and when dealing with a present bodily concern (showing how members have a direct, immediate relationship with the site). In addition, analysis illustrates how users face having to structure their communication to try to avoid 'triggering' distress in others. The paper concludes by pointing to the need to focus on the multiple emerging relationships between bodies and social media in mental health due to the ways the latter are becoming increasingly prominent technologies through which to experience the body when distressed.
Social media's networked form of communication provides people with bodies that are combinations of embodied and technologically-mediated action. This creates multiple forms of visibility within the infospheres (Terranova, 2004) of social media, which require simultaneous production of bodies in and through offline and online spaces. Bergson's non-dualistic model of bodies as images addresses the challenges of experiencing 'bodies online'; understood as expressions that blur the subject-object and representation-being dualisms. This paper explores how socially mediated bodies are disposed for action in ways that involve negotiating communication through the mediated noise (Serres) of social media, along with managing bodies that are faced with the spatialisation of time through new features such as Facebook Timeline.
MySpace.com is an online social network site (SNS) where users build a 'profile page' to communicate with millions of other users all over the globe. MySpace users customise their profile page with words, photographs, pictures, music, biographical information and other visual/textual icons. There are a number of unique practices that are inherent to these new online social spaces that extend from the need to maintain a personal profile. For example, many users will regularly update their profiles with new visual or textual information (a practice that will be identified as 'profile changing'). However, over the last few years MySpace has experienced a decline in terms of the numbers of users that visit the site. This article takes a historical look at the use of MySpace in order to explore some wider issues in online communication practices.Through an empirical analysis of 100 open-access MySpace profiles, this paper will examine the use of SNSs in relation to issues of self, community and wastefulness. This work also addresses the ongoing need to blur the boundaries of visual/textual, online/offline, reality/representation and social/psychological in the way we understand the relationship between human experience and technology. KEY WORDS Mediated
a Ian M. Tucker teaches social psychology and leads the Psychology and Social Change Research Group at the University of East London. His research interests focus on the psychological aspects of community mental health, digital technologies, and space. b Lewis Goodings teaches social and organizational psychology at the University of Roehampton. His research is dedicated to the area of computer-mediated communication and a qualitative form of social psychology that explores the broader social dynamics of technology, discourse, and organization. (2008) Michel Serres shows how the body is not an abstracted, dislocated surface that allows for the objectification of the senses and instead illustrates how it is a process ABSTRACT In The Five Senses
In this paper we are concerned with the question of how we feel when living in concert with multiple technologies. More specifically, we are focused on the influx of digital apps designed to manage psychological wellbeing. We draw on empirical work exploring one such app, Stress Free, and focus on the experiences of stress and technological tools designed to lessen stress. Our concern is with the way that technologies become part of the experience of stress as opposed to solely understanding the app as a tool aimed to reduce the occurrence and severity of stress. This involves taking a theoretical journey through philosophies of technology that provide valuable resources for conceptualising the relational characteristics of digitally mediated stress. Our wider interest is to speak to broader concerns with the movement to ‘digital care’ and the implications for how we conceptualise technology, self and care therein.
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