Political acclamation, social media and the public mood

Abstract

This article approaches social media from the theory of the religio-political practice of acclamation revived by Agamben and following twentieth-century social and political thought and theology (of Weber, Peterson, Schmitt, Kantorowicz). It supplements that theory by more recent political-theoretical, historical and sociological investigations and regards acclamation as a ‘social institution’ following Mauss. Acclamation is a practice that forms publics, whether as the direct presence of the ‘people’, mass-mediated ‘public opinion’, or a ‘public mood’ decipherable through countless social media postings. The article surveys issues of differential geographies of access, weighting of posts, value-creation, orality and gesture, algorithmic governmentality, and Big Data and knowledge production. It argues that social media constitute a public from a mass of individualized, private postings. It concludes that they make possible forms of political calculability and action, yet are continuous with ritual and liturgical elements of political life. This study contributes to an analytics of publicity.

¿Quién es el troll?: La construcción de identidades políticas en social media en el contexto peruano

“…Este aspecto es propiciado por el mismo diseño de las plataformas de social media, el cual alienta la rápida toma de posiciones y actitudes en las discusiones que se suscitan (Nusselder, 2013). De acuerdo con Dean (2016), estas plataformas permiten la expresión de aprobación a través de funcionalidades como likes y follows, provocando y formando afecto por figuras, lo que funciona como una nueva forma de aclamación. En la aclamación, las características singulares de distintas expresiones individuales se pierden, quedando solo un efecto acumulativo en el cual la formación de determinadas reacciones incentiva su propia reproducción.…”

“…Por otro lado, estas mismas plataformas también admiten el retiro de la aprobación o incluso la expresión de desaprobación (Dean, 2016). Tyler y Bennett (2010) sugieren que el odio, desprecio o rechazo a personalidades también puede servir como elemento formador de comunidades, como un "anti-fandom".…”

Politics and ‘the digital’

“…To ask this question is not to dismiss wholesale numeric artefacts as an object of inquiry, but to call for a specification of their social and political coordinates. The scope of the debates surveyed by the contributors to this special issue indicates that most of these fields of knowledge production are impacted by issues related to the wide circulation and use of digital devices: this includes cultural studies (Leander, this issue), political theory (Dean, this issue), social theory, security studies, international relations (Aradau and Blanke, this issue; Opitz, this issue) and law (Bellanova, this issue). Yet, why and how these fields should care about digital affordances deserves to be specified further, which requires an investigation of some of the scholarly claims that are made in this regard.…”

“…This understanding supports her attempt to locate DAESH recruitment videos alongside their commercial online equivalents. Dean (this issue) demonstrates how social media enact and redeploy practices of political acclamation rather than changing the way in which publics are constituted. Opitz (this issue), finally, scrutinizes how methods of pandemic simulation establish a ‘peculiar form of self-observation’, a new relation to the social from within the social.…”

“…Examples of such subjects range from users of social media who ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ (cf. Dean, this issue), to those who disturb established patterns of coded behaviour such as Snowden (Bauman et al, 2014), or even extremist organizations who recruit members digitally (cf. Leander, this issue).…”