Atmospheres and Digital Media

MKV/DigiTrans Higher Seminar with Ana Jorge, Associate Professor at Lusófona University, Lisbon, Portugal.

The talk presents our forthcoming book, Atmospheres and Digital Media, exploring how encounters with digital and social media can change and drift in response to particular affective atmospheres, which are both individually and collectively embodied, and affected by spatial, material, and cultural circumstances. We draw on the framework of ‘affective atmospheres’ to make sense of people's connection to and disconnection from digital media, both as objects or devices and as content or text, unpacking the dynamic interplay of moods and sensations, and digital media platforms, communities and codes, in situated sociocultural contexts.
To illustrate this perspective, I will focus on our analysis of pilgrimage practices, focusing on the cases of Santiago de Compostela, Fátima and World Youth Day. Our analysis examines how different moments of pilgrimage – before, during, and after these events – evoke, build, and augment collective feelings of anticipation, presence and (pro)longing that suffuse social media atmospheres. Crucially, the analysis highlights how contradictory affects circulate at each of those moments. These practices emerge as cyclical in nature, eschewing the clear-cut divisions that pervade disconnection rhetoric.

Ana Jorge is Associate Professor at Lusófona University and Senior Researcher at CICANT. She holds a Communication Sciences PhD from NOVA University of Lisbon (2012), where she also conducted postdoctoral research on Media Education (2015), both with individual grants from FCT. Ana researches on audiences, digital culture, children, youth and media, celebrity and influencer culture.