Thursday, November 26th, 16.30-18 pm
Abstract
Our ordinary lives, bodies, memories, relationships, fantasies, desires, affects and fears flow and inhabit different spaces, media and digital platforms, giving rise to narratives, self-(re)presentations and interactions shaped by a networked shared agency of heterogeneous participants. A networked collective of people, devices, corporations, and institutions take part in the production and archiving of digital inscriptions, which materialise our emotions and contribute to the configuration and inscription of our bodies, habits, and abilities. These inscriptions become the content of digital spaces, platforms, search engines and mobile apps, as well as the stuff data are made of, whose commercialisation is the main source of benefits, or business model, for the corporations that own these platforms. Everyday forms of affecting and being affected result of the conflicting entanglements of such network. Drawing on Kathleen Stewart notion of “ordinary affects” and our research results about everyday digital practices carried out in Madrid, this talk will discuss the connexions between the affective and the attention economies enacted in digital practices that shape contemporary affective cultures, focusing on the disquiets, shames and shaming elicited in uses and practices of social media and online images sharing. As shame is a central affect of sociability, linked to the structures of the social order and its exclusions, to social norms and expectations, as well as to social hierarchies, that set what is appropriate and what is not.