EMOTIONAL NEWS, EMOTIONAL COUNTERPUBLIC

Abstract

Examining a popular news blog that targets Chinese diaspora living in the United States, this paper explores how emotionally-oriented digital news sustains the diasporic community as an emotional counterpublic. The salience of emotionality in the Chinese diasporic media sphere has to do with the complex identity of diasporic news bloggers, and their adaptation to the new media logic of interactivity and participation. This paper finds that diasporic news bloggers regularly construct an emotional climate of fear through the normalization of a number of narrative strategies in their routine practices. Keeping in perspective the socio-cultural context in which diasporic media operate, this paper argues that the construction of fear as a collective emotion holds civic potentials, for it bridges the political life and everyday life, and connects the diasporic counterpublic with the dominant public sphere of the receiving society. Particularly, the fear-evoking news potentially enhances civic engagement in five ways, namely personalized sense-making, moral evaluation, mobilization, therapeutic closure and cohesion maintenance. Caveats on the use of emotionality in journalism are also discussed at the end.

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