Small Stories of Mourning and Affective Positioning

Global Mediatized Death and Emotion: Parasocial Grieving—Mourning #stephenhawking on Twitter

“…This study analyzed how social media mourners expressed parasocial grieving following Stephen Hawking’s death and how that shaped mediatized global flows of emotion in terms of digital affect culture. Findings indicated that technological affordances and features of social media allowed mourners to perform traditional death rituals and create varied forms of web-based content with new visual cues (i.e., emoji) that mold the digital grieving process (Giaxoglou, 2020; Giaxoglou & Döveling, 2018; Highfield, 2018). The commemorative use of hashtags shaped affective communication online where mourners connected with similar others across diverse geographic, ethnic, and religious backgrounds to promote the celebrity’s legacy (Döveling et al, 2018).…”

“…Like conventional media, social media play a crucial role in the mediatization process. The social media mediatization process has transformed human relations and behaviors and brought changes in society and culture (Giaxoglou, 2020). In the mediatization process, media serve as an independent social institution governed by its own sets of rules and shape other social and cultural institutions, and modes of interaction are changed because of the growth of media’s influence (Hjarvard, 2008; Morse, 2018).…”

“…Emotion is a discursively constructed cultural practice or product “guided by implied norms of what and how individuals should feel and how they should express and ‘do emotions’ in any given relational context” (Döveling et al, 2018, p. 2). Three intersecting levels of affective culture or emotional flows are manifested through digital memorial activity, such as micro, meso, and macro-level (Döveling et al, 2018; Giaxoglou, 2020; Giaxoglou & Döveling, 2018). The micro-level manifestation occurs when people experience a personal loss and grief, or emotional intensity and attachment become shared locally.…”

“…Findings provide support for the connection between the mediatization of death and emotion. In the online mediatization process, social media logics (e. g., institutional function and technological affordability of media) shape individuals’ grief and affective communication where memorial cultures are practiced as part of everyday social life (Giaxoglou, 2020; Hjarvard, 2008; Morse, 2018). Findings suggested that the technological affordability of social media facilitate engaging geographically dispersed mourners in a symbolic space to perform death events thoroughly in and by media (Gibson, 2007b).…”

Utterance chains: A dialogic route to speculative thinking-with toddlers in the Chthulucene

“…Intuited meanings are therefore signified within the culture through which they are generated, yet they are also pregnant with symbolic potential (Cassirer, 2021). As Giaxoglou (2021) asserts, time and place play an important role in the structure and positioning of stories that are told, and through which identities are represented and performed. For this reason, the expression of any utterance provides opportunities to think beyond fixed assertions of meaning, since: ‘even the slightest allusion to another’s utterance gives the speech a dialogical turn that cannot be produced by any purely referential theme with its own object’ (Bakhtin, 1986: 94).…”