The Circulation of Rage

Onge, Jeffrey St.

doi:10.4324/9781351242370-14

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Indeed, memes often express negativity toward governments (Moody-Ramirez & Church, 2019) and may have populist undercurrents (Kristensen & Mortensen, 2021). Some even contend that memes promote populist movements (Onge, 2018). As Miltner (2018) argued, “memes often reflect and invoke the rage of the subordinated” (p. 420).…”

Section: Outcomes Of Exposure To Political Memesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Memeing Politics: Understanding Political Meme Creators, Audiences, and Consequences on Social Media

Halversen,

Weeks

2023

Social Media + Society

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Political memes have become a common way for people to be exposed to political content and express their political views online. However, little is known about who shares political memes online or whether exposure to memes is associated with key attitudinal, emotional, and behavioral political outcomes. To address these gaps, this study uses data from a two-wave survey (YouGov) of American adults fielded during the 2020 U.S. presidential election ( N = 1800) to investigate (a) predictors of creating and sharing political memes on Facebook and (b) associated outcomes of exposure to political memes on Facebook. Results reveal that sharing political memes is a form of political expression employed by a variety of people in the United States, including political moderates and people both politically interested and noninterested. The data suggest that people who circulate political memes are motivated to make fun of politicians, but also to persuade and inform others in some cases. Results also highlight potential consequences of exposure to political memes, such as heightened online opinion expression, political participation, and anger toward the opposing presidential candidate. Taken together, the results provide insights into how people engage with memes and their associations with key political outcomes and offer an important foundation for future work on the effects of political memes.

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Section: Outcomes Of Exposure To Political Memesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Memeing Politics: Understanding Political Meme Creators, Audiences, and Consequences on Social Media

Halversen,

Weeks

2023

Social Media + Society

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show abstract

“…Current discussions on the emotional dimension of political disinformation tend to focus exclusively on how it ignites negative feelings, like outrage and hate (cf. Bakir & McStay, 2018; Clark & Zhang, 2018; Keener, 2018; Onge, 2018). In contrast, our study highlights the complementary role of buoyant expressions and positive self-imagining—enabled in part by Facebook’s “pro-social” affordances—in powering the far-right-wing digital media ecosystem.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Delighting and Detesting Engagement: Emotional Politics of Junk News

Savolainen

Trilling

Liotsiou

2020

Social Media + Society

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How do audiences make sense of and interact with political junk news on Facebook? How does the platform’s “emotional architecture” intervene in these sense-making, interactive processes? What kinds of mediated publics emerge on and through Facebook as a result? We study these questions through topic modeling 40,500 junk news articles, quantitatively analyzing their engagement metrics, and a qualitative comment analysis. This exploratory research design allows us to move between levels of public discourse, zooming in from cross-outlet talking points to microsociological processes of meaning-making, interaction, and emotional entrainment taking place within the comment boxes themselves. We propose the concepts of delighting and detesting engagement to illustrate how the interplay between audiences, platform architecture, and political junk news generates a bivalent emotional dynamic that routinely divides posts into highly “loved” and highly “angering.” We argue that high-performing (or in everyday parlance, viral) junk news bring otherwise disparate audience members together and orient their dramatic focus toward objects of collective joy, anger, or concern. In this context, the nature of political junk news is performative as they become resources for emotional signaling and the construction of group identity and shared feeling on social media. The emotions that animate junk news audiences typically refer back to a transpiring social relationship between two political sides. This affectively loaded “us” versus “them” dynamic is both enforced by Facebook’s emotional architecture and made use of by junk news publishers.

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The tempest within: the origins and outcomes of intense national emotions in times of national division

Feinstein

2024

Theor Soc

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Theories of intense national emotions have focused on affection for the home nation and antagonism for national others but overlooked antagonism for fellow nationals. The article introduces a comprehensive theory of intense national emotions. It first discusses the sources of the potential energy stored in national identities, pointing to a combination of two factors: the nation is at once potent due to its capacity to shield against existential threats and precarious due to its dependence on the reproduction of contested narratives. The article then explains that events that—through a construction process elaborated in the text—seem to threaten or promise to alter perceived core elements of the nation (i.e., “nation-disrupting events”) evoke intense emotions. Next, the article explains why some periods of "hot" nationalism increase national division rather than unity. The conclusion proposes a promising direction for future research on intense national emotions as a mechanism of eventfulness.

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The Circulation of Rage

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Memeing Politics: Understanding Political Meme Creators, Audiences, and Consequences on Social Media

Memeing Politics: Understanding Political Meme Creators, Audiences, and Consequences on Social Media

Delighting and Detesting Engagement: Emotional Politics of Junk News

The tempest within: the origins and outcomes of intense national emotions in times of national division

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