Togetherness after terror: The more or less digital commemorative public atmospheres of the Manchester Arena bombing’s first anniversary

Abstract

This article examines the forms and feelings of togetherness evident in both Manchester city centre and on social media during the first anniversary of the 22 May 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. To do this, we introduce a conceptual framework that conceives commemorative public atmospheres as composed of a combination of ‘more or less digital’ elements. We also present a methodological approach that combines the computational collection and analysis of Twitter content with short-term team autoethnography. First, the article addresses the concept of public atmospheres before introducing the case study and outlining our methodology. We then analyse the shifting moods of togetherness created by the official programme of commemorative events known as Manchester Together and their digital mediatisation through Twitter. We then explore a grassroots initiative, #LoveMCRBees, and how it relied on the materialisation of social media logics to connect people. Overall, we demonstrate how public atmospheres, as constituted in more and less digital ways, provide a framework for conceptualising commemorative events, and how togetherness is reworked by social media, especially in the context of responses to terrorism.

Shockwaves

“…While the visual and performative economy of the aft ermath of terrorism is rich in commemorative events oft en held in central urban squares (Closs Stephens et al 2017;Merrill et al 2020), the lived experience of neighborhoods removed from the commemorative scene include more sinister and harmful atmospherics, that bear multisensory connections to the experience of war zones. In neighborhoods where security forces focus counterterror operations, what for mainstream urban publics is "the aft ermath" of terror, translates instead into an atmospheric unsettling of micro-and intimate scales of domesticity, the body, and the emotional sphere (Hergon, this issue).…”

Bir Araştırma Kaynağı Olarak Arşivlenen Sosyal Medya Verilerinin Kullanımı

“…Çalışmada terör saldırısı gibi büyük bir acil durum olayı gerçekleştiğinde hashtaglerin Twitter iletişimi için hemen alakalı olmayabileceği sonucuna ulaşılmıştır. Merrill, Sumartojo, Stephens ve Coward (2020), 22 Mayıs 2017'de Manchester Arena bombalamasının birinci yıldönümü anmasında sosyal medyada belirgin olan birliktelik biçimlerini ve duygularını incelemiştir. Ayrıca çalışmada, Twitter içeriğinin hesaplamalı olarak toplanmasını ve analizini birleştiren metodolojik bir yaklaşım da sunulmuştur.…”

New geographies of commemoration

“…This reinforces the usefulness of experiential accounts for foregrounding those individual attunements that both connect us in shared events and afford wiggle room for a diversity of perspectives and forms of understanding. Put differently, if (affective and sensory) feelings are part of how we make sense of national events, and how we come to value them, then their purported intentions of reinforcing the contours and boundaries of group identities are disrupted by the very unpredictable and excessive nature of these moods and impressions (see Merrill et al, 2020). This requires a shift from focusing on the details of shared national narrative to an insistence on the unfixability of things, or ‘that which subverts this tendency in the political to present itself as already fully formed’ (Himada and Manning in Jellis and Gerlach, 2017: 564).…”