Networked affect

Our encounters with websites, avatars, videos, mobile apps, discussion forums, GIFs, and nonhuman intelligent agents allow us to experience sensations of connectivity, interest, desire, and attachment -- as well as detachment, boredom, fear, and shame. Some affective online encounters may arouse complex, contradictory feelings that resist dualistic distinctions. In this book, leading scholars examine the fluctuating and altering dynamics of affect that give shape to online connections and disconnections. Doing so, they tie issues of circulation and connectivity to theorizations of networked affect. Their diverse investigations -- considering subjects that range from online sexual dynamics to the liveliness of computer code -- demonstrate the value of affect theories for Internet studies. The contributors investigate networked affect in terms of intensity, sensation, and value. They explore online intensities that range from Tumblr practices in LGBTQ communities to visceral reactions to animated avatars; examine the affective materiality of software in such platforms as steampunk culture and nonprofit altporn; and analyze the ascription of value to online activities including the GTD ("getting things done") movement and the accumulation of personal digital materials.

Introduction: Networks of transmission : intensity, sensation, value / Susanna Paasonen, Ken Hillis, and Michael Petit -- Intensity. A midsummer's bonfire : affective intensities of online debate / Susanna Paasonen ; Queer reverb : Tumblr, affect, time / Alexander Cho ; Affective politics or political affection : online sexuality in Turkey / Veronika Tzankova ; The avatar and online affect / Ken Hillis ; Affect and drive / Jodi Dean -- Sensation. Ethologies of software art and affect : what can a digital body of code do? / Jussi Parikka ; Sensation, networks and the GIF : toward an allotropic account of affect / James Ash ; Technologies of feeling : affect between the analog and the digital / Jenny Sundén ; 'Make love not porn' : entrepreneurial voyeurism, agency and affect / Stephen Maddison ; Digital disaffect : teaching through screens / Michael Petit -- Value. Getting things done : productivity, self-management, and the order of things / Melissa Gregg ; 'Let's express our friendship by sending each other funny links instead of actually talking' : gifts, commodities and social reproduction in Facebook / Kylie Jarrett ; Happy accidents : Facebook and the value of affect / Tero K…