Introduction: Affective Fabrics of Digital Cultures

Abstract

The idea of exploring affective fabrics of digital cultures has been at the back of my mind for several years. My first encounter with the dense and complex conjunction of the social, the affective and the digital was when I was conducting the ethnography of an online community and researching passionate online nationalism, militarism and racism. I was looking at the effects of hatred, contempt and disgust in and out of cyberspace (Kuntsman, 2009). My ethnography followed virtual circulation of racist texts and images, cyberfantasies of rape and torture in the name of national security, or simply day-to-day online interactions in which the violence of racism and nationalism was normalized into the mundane, sprinkled with ‘smileys’ and often dismissed as ‘just a game’. I was aiming to conceptualize the political and psychic effects of those powerful emotions, as they circulated on- and offline. I wanted to grasp the profound effect of online violence on many Internet users (and myself as an ethnographer) by looking at the ways in which feelings and affective states can reverberate in and out of cyberspace, intensified (or muffled) and transformed through digital circulation and repetition. I wanted to find a language that captures the ways in which affect and emotions take shape through movement between contexts, websites, forums, blogs, comments, and computer screens, flooding us with words, and at times, leaving us speechless.

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