Abstract
This article calls for a rethinking of the formation of affective publics as a ritual process. Given the particularities of networked media, I suggest that media rituals extend into the formation of affective publics celebrating imagined collectivities in a fashion of collaborative storytelling. This is a transitional process in which a collectivity is validated, affirmed and reinforced through ritual actions. To illustrate this dynamic, I suggest drawing upon three key concepts (namely temporality, performativity and liminality), which are derivatives of media rituals theory, but also shed light on the dynamics of affective publics. To specify, first, ritual temporality refers to ambient concentrations that create a breach in the ordinary flow of media texts. Second, performativity implicates the affect-driven rhythms of digital storytelling feeding algorithmic curations that form an embodied harmony between participants and a sense of collectivity. Third, liminality entails ambiguous situations that enable the formation of affective publics by means of voluntary commitment, anonymity and the uniformity of participants. These concepts are the key entry points in capturing the ritual aspects of affective publics. Viewed through this lens, scrutiny for the ritual dynamics of networked publics helps us to grasp the affective formations of networked media.
Networked media technologies are marked by communicative architectures that no longer separate media production from media consumption. This transformation furnishes a networked space, eloquently conceived as a ‘convergence culture’ (Jenkins, 2006), in which diverse stories are being told through endless flows of media texts. Moreover, as these technologies do not clearly demarcate the roles of storytelling and readership/viewership, the publics take the place of the audience in networked media (Ito, 2008). The users of networked media make meaningful conversations and tell digital stories that gradually bring networked publics into existence. As digital storytellers, they may take the opportunity to challenge the dominant regimes of truth and give voice to historically disempowered groups (Jackson and Foucault Welles, 2015, 2016; Papacharissi, 2016), or the society as a whole living under authoritarian regimes (Kermani and Tafreshi, 2022). Yet, networked publics may also facilitate ‘dissonant communication’ (Pfetsch, 2018) giving rise to hate speech, conspiracy thinking and misinformation, and therefore, it should not be merely regarded in terms of its democratising potential (Lünenborg, 2020).
In any case, the utmost gravity of networked media does not only lie in its affordances that introduce new possibilities for users’ participation in meaning making practices. As Boyd (2010) states, the architecture of networked media configure a communicative environment that is also informed by practices amplifying and spreading what is said. Consequentially, in addition to meaning making practices of digital storytelling, replicability and scalability are equally important. Networked publics also come to the fore in their collectively deciding what sorts of stories are worth spreading, and to what extent and to whom they are spread. In that regard, debates over the networked publics question the idea that the participatory cultures of new media set the scene for public debate based on rational deliberation; and therefore, the understanding of networked media in the Habermasian terms of a public sphere has limited explanatory potential (Jackson and Foucault Welles, 2015; Lünenborg, 2020). For a more adequate understanding of networked media, Papacharissi (2016, 2015a) and Lünenborg (2020) suggest that networked publics are affective formations. 1 Publics come into existence through diverse media practices including the production and circulation of media texts, and these cannot be reduced to being only discursive constructions. They are instead built upon tidal flows characterised by rhythm, pace and tone (Papacharissi, 2016). In that regard, networked publics simultaneously emerge through discursive articulations and affective investments.
This article is grounded in such an understanding of networked publics and calls for a rethinking of affective formations as ritual processes. By saying so, I mean the aggregation of publicly visible networked media practices enacted by a multiplicity of actors ‘in a festive style’ (Hepp and Couldry, 2010: 2). Festivity, which is in question here, implicates participants’ cheerful moods, but may also characterise the term with concern, outrage, anxiety and so forth (Couldry, 2003: 60). The term thus refers to an event’s distinguished capacity of enthralling people with digital storytelling. According to Dayan (2010: 25), who mostly uses the concept within televisual contexts, media rituals ‘invite their audiences to stop being spectators and to become witnesses or participants of a . . . performance’. Given the participatory cultures of networked media, media rituals therefore extend into the formation of affective publics celebrating imagined collectivities in a fashion of collaborative storytelling. In a nutshell, the formation of affective publics is a transitional stage in which a collectivity is validated, affirmed and reinforced through ritual actions in networked media.
Recent scholarship on affective publics more or less takes these dynamics into consideration, despite barely conceiving of them as media rituals. To specify, networked communication is regarded as affective flows or waves that come to build and maintain digital communities through cultural narratives in the sense #MeToo activism (Dawson, 2020), the public outcry of anti-immigrant sentiment in Germany (Adlung et al., 2021), and lesbian gay and bisexual youth’s vlogging on Youtube as a journey of the self-validation of their identities (Lovelock, 2019). Among those, Papacharissi’s (2016, 2015a, 2015b) work comes to the fore as she conceives of digital storytelling as a liminal space ‘to describe stages of transition and in-between positions that liminal individuals occupy’ (Papacharissi, 2015a: 124). These are all directional cues towards the idea that the formation of affective publics is a ritual process. By the same token, I stand in dialogue with this strand of thought and reconsider affective publics as media rituals.
On these grounds, I suggest that rethinking affective publics as networked media rituals is productive of renewed insights into affectivity. Echoing with Turner’s (1969, 1982) understanding, networked media rituals came to be thought of as a process in which networked publics come into ecstatic existence. Media rituals theory, in this sense, provides an insight into the genesis of affective publics, in that the processes can be analysed in terms of temporality, performativity, and liminality. This is, to a great extent, an affective process that exert a ritual power so that a sense of gravity is produced and maintained. The affective publics thereby re-imagine, negotiate, or dislocate the hegemonic imaginaries of society and culture. Viewed through this lens, networked media rituals serve to draw attention not only to pre-planned, scheduled events (like contests, conquests and coronations) but also to spontaneous and acute events that attract immediate attention of emergent publics (e.g. news events including -but not limited to- protests, terror attacks, disasters).
In what follows, I first revisit theories of media rituals that are mostly related to television genres (Couldry, 2003; Dayan and Katz, 1992), but somehow remain relevant in this age of networked media (see Brügger, 2022; Frosh and Pinchevski, 2018; Rathnayake, 2021; Valaskivi et al., 2022). Following this, considering three key terms (temporality, performativity, and liminality), I illustrate networked media rituals that enable the processual formation of affective publics.
Rituals of mass media and networked media
Media rituals are specifically associated with certain media events of mass communication that are distinguished from routine flows of broadcasting and characterised by ceremonial presence. According to Dayan and Katz (1992), ritualised media events are historic ceremonies marked by their greatness that call for the interruptions of routine. In the same sense, they tremendously attract the audiences’ attention to the extent that they make gravity of ordinary people’s lives. In Dayan and Katz’s (1992: 12) formulation, ritualised media events are related to ‘the core values of society’ and serve integrative functions. They thereupon address specific television scripts that create and maintain societal values including contests (e.g. Olympic Games and Eurovision Song Contest), conquests (e.g. the moon landings) and coronations (such as parades and funerals). Although this formulation refers to a very narrow category of events, further debates call for a broader category including mediated events that are rather spontaneous and disruptive such as national disasters, terror events and wars (Katz and Liebes, 2007). Ritualised media events’ integrative capacity is largely questioned; therefore, they are reconceived as discursive spaces that shape or are shaped by conflicts in society (Cottle, 2006; Couldry, 2003; Sonnevend, 2018). Consequently, media rituals are composed of communicative processes (including diverse media events) in which social bonds are created and maintained through ritualised actions. Viewed through this lens, there are two complementary readings of media rituals: One puts a greater emphasis on ritualisation as a medium for the creation of collective sentiments, and the other pays attention to the power dynamics in meaning making processes.
First, reading media rituals as process of creating collective sentimentality departs from the idea that they only provide the shared knowledge of collectivities. As Dayan (2010) suggests, ritualised media events also provide visual proximity and shared temporality that helps in constructing a ‘we’. Ritual actions are thus not only meaning-making practices that draw on the symbolic boundaries of collective identities but also cultivate a sense of togetherness and belonging (Orlova, 2016; Valaskivi et al., 2022). In Dayan and Katz’s (1992: 112) account, the unity of time and action set the scene for a ritual expression that ‘creates a feeling of togetherness, of one-bodiness’. This way of thinking is mostly inspired by Turner’s theories of ritual that are somewhat linked with Durkheim’s perspective. For this reason, there is a risk of giving priority to integration over conflict in meaning-making practices (Couldry, 2003). Moreover, the euphoric experience of collectivity by no means stems from stable and given sets of values but emanates from constitutive actions (Hepp and Couldry, 2010).
In the pursuit of overcoming these shortcomings, my reading draws upon the Turnerian understanding of ritual ‘essentially as performance, enactment, not primarily as rules or rubrics’ (Turner, 1982: 79). In this way, media rituals are liminal stages eventfully aggregated into imagined communities. They are thus potent temporalities (St John, 2008). Indeed, Turner does not understand the ritual transition merely as a cognitive process. Ritual practices mobilise synchronous feelings so that ‘existence’ and ‘ecstasy’ become homologous terms (Turner, 1969: 138). From this vantage point, media rituals are affective practices performatively constructing imagined collectivities. Although these collectivities may turn into robust imaginaries, they are initially spontaneous formations ‘richly charged with affects, mainly pleasurable ones’ (Turner, 1969: 139).
Second, media rituals are by no means dissociable from power dynamics. Media events constitute discursive spaces in which the core values of society are articulated. To do so, they exert a ritual power that constructs a sense of centre (Couldry, 2003; Hepp and Couldry, 2010; Rothenbuhler, 2010). To the extent that media rituals succeed in establishing the omnipresence of events, they come to reinforce and maintain hegemonic imaginaries (Kellner, 2010). Yet it is not possible to reach a final closure of meanings attributed to events; the meanings of media rituals are invariably prone to be contested and redefined. By the same token, media rituals hardly reach a pervading understanding of ‘we’. As Hepp and Couldry (2010: 11) suggest, they are rather a ‘situative thickening of media communication’ performatively remade or unmade through power struggles. Their ultimate capacity in reaching mass participants is a possible home for alternative readings. And the shared experience of media rituals barely translates into the fixed and stable imagination of a ‘global we’.
This dynamism is notably prevalent in networked media. Given that media events move the audience to participate in ritualised action, networked media come to the fore as the ultimate site in which the participants invariably leave digital footprints through viewing, sharing, posting, liking and commenting. Indeed, these digital footprints go well beyond merely reflecting on the gravity of media events. They are active engagements with the media ritual, rendered possible by the affordances of networked media platforms (Rathnayake, 2021; Valaskivi et al., 2022). That is to say, the eventness of media rituals is collaboratively created and amplified by means of the users’ communicative practices (Frosh and Pinchevski, 2018). What is worth being eventually ritualised derives from the collaborative storytelling of ordinary people. Interrelatedly, the thickened narratives of media rituals are unpredictably diverse and bottom-up creations, for digital storytelling is a non-linear process, as Couldry (2008) states. We should therefore consider the multiplicity of mediated centres (Brügger, 2022; Couldry, 2003; Goldfarb, 2018). Preferentially, media rituals are marked with eccentricities at the age of networked media. User participants unpredictably reconstruct media rituals by means of computer-mediated interactivity.
Viewed through these lenses, my reading of ritualised media events equally stresses both the creation of collective sentimentality and the discursive construction of mediated centres. Thus, media rituals are comprised of two separate but complementary levels: At the level of affectivity, euphoric experience is key to the formation of imagined collectivities. Particularly in networked media settings, affective investments reverberate around the digital footprints of computer-mediated interactivity (Kunstman, 2021). At the level of discursivity, media rituals constitute the narratives that create and maintain the symbolic boundaries of collectivities. Digital storytelling may thereupon give new direction to these narratives, insofar as it challenges, negotiates, or reconstructs mediated centres.
The ritual aspects of affective publics
As networked media rituals are substantially different from their counterparts in mass media systems, we need to reconceptualise ritualised media practices in networked settings. Above all, networked media effectively work as vehicles for discursive formations, mostly relying on the open end-to-end architecture of communication (Ito, 2008). Therefore, the ways that collective sentimentality is created and the symbolic boundaries of imagined collectivities are drawn have their own particularities in networked media. To illustrate these dynamics, I suggest three key concepts (namely temporality, performativity and liminality) that do not only help us in dissecting ritual processes in digital communication, but can also lead us to an outline of the formation of affective publics. As a matter of fact, these concepts are derivatives of media rituals theory. Yet they also shed light on the dynamics of affective publics. On that account, these concepts are the key entry points in order to capture the ritual aspects of affective publics.
Ritual temporality shifting from liveness to ambience
Media rituals are marked by their distinctive temporality, which differentiates them from the ordinary flows of media texts. To put it differently, media rituals come out of pseudo-sacred time slots that interrupt the ordinary, predictable, quotidian conduct of life. Be it pre-planned and scheduled media events, as Dayan and Katz (1992) formerly defined, or spontaneous events (including protests, disasters, wars, terror attacks, etc.) dramatically boosting the viewers’ arousal (Katz and Liebes, 2007; Lewis, 2008), media rituals are characterised by shared immediacy. In this way, the greatness, specialness and gravity of media rituals are put into practice. Indeed, as their gravity is not inherently embedded in the events themselves but discursively constructed, ritual temporality is the primary mechanism that attaches importance to events (Couldry, 2003). In that way, media rituals are differentiated from ordinary media texts; they become the symbolic markers of imagined collectivities that are celebrated and affirmed through festive viewing and participation.
Dayan and Katz (1992) put greater emphasis on the live broadcasting of ritualised media events. Liveness, in their view, significantly interrupts ordinary broadcasting and signifies the greatness and specialness of the ritual in the presence of audiences. Insofar as media rituals conquer time through live broadcasting, they achieve synchronicity and shared temporality. Yet, Couldry (2003: 66) eloquently questions the necessity of live broadcasting. He instead emphasises the capacity of ‘construct[ing] a sense of “centre”’ leading to shared immediacy at a massive scale, which does not necessarily rely on live broadcasting. In either forms, media rituals create a temporality that ‘has something magical about it’ in Turner’s (1982: 47) words. The magic of ritual temporality lies in its potential to show sympathy for others, as synchronicity sets the scene for participants to mutually relate with others. Shared experience generates symbolic spaces of proximity, association and affinity. In that way, ritual temporality cultivates the affective embodiment of collectivities.
Nevertheless, we should note that the very nature of digital communication precludes simultaneous spectatorship and participation (Brügger, 2022). Diverse forms of engagement with media texts including (re-)creation, circulation, or the simple passive spectatorship of contents are not simultaneously prevalent but extend over time. For that reason, networked media technologies undermine the media events’ capacity for the homogenisation of time. Yet the temporal scatter should not mislead us into considering shared temporality in networked media as being impossible (Seeck and Rantanen, 2015; Ytreberg, 2017). As Frosh and Pinchevski (2018: 137) state, the temporal characteristics of media events shift ‘from a heightened presence of shared immediacy to a thickened present of potentiality’. Therefore, there still exists a sense of shared immediacy that is rather characterised by the intensification of action in certain time frames. Liveness thereby translates into serial actions (such as tweeting, commenting, liking, sharing, viewing, etc.) that aggregate into networked event.
Hence, networked media rituals create magic by thickening participations that open up space for proximity, association and affinity. In order to understand the ritual temporality of thickening participations, I borrow from Papacharissi’s (2016 : 316) conceptual framework and conceive of this ritual participation as an ambient formation. For her, networked ambience refers to a situation in which participants are ‘always on feeds further connecting and pluralizing expression’. The collaborative narratives unfold through media events that repetitively practice media in a way that simultaneously reaches thousands of media texts. Indeed, networked ambience is both produced by, and brings into existence, affective publics. Affectivity largely characterises the ambient flows of media texts because networked ambience goes well beyond the accumulation of informative news and opinions. It is rather a streaming environment ‘blending humor, news sharing, opinion expression and emotion’ (Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012: 278). Moreover, repetitive tendencies lead to the consideration of the essence of affective intensities rather than cognitive meaning-making processes. Finally, networked ambience is created and maintained by publics for it is discursively built upon collective storytelling (Papacharissi, 2016).
In this sense, networked ambience is a breach in the ordinary flow of media texts. It generates an affective-discursive space in which the participants spontaneously encounter each other, and intensely and dramatically narrate the event. Ambient streams make room for spontaneity and unpredictability that potently translates into ritual practices. Echoing a Turnerian understanding of ritual as ‘a symphony or synaesthetic ensemble’ (Turner, 1982: 82), networked ambience presents polyphony and polyaesthetesia. It accommodates a multiplicity of voices and a plurality of embodied sensations but also the collective enthralment with networked media rituals in specific time frames.
Rhythms of performativity
The notoriety and specialness of ritualised media events do not pre-exist knowledge regimes but are fictional products that are performatively constructed. Thus, their distinct capacity in assuring broad participation does not stem from the intrinsic properties of the events themselves. Their greatness derives from the performative effects of signifying practices that constitute media rituals as great, special occasions with the utmost gravity. That is to say, participants diversely create and engage with the narratives of media rituals and gradually redefine and negotiate the meanings of events. The technological affordances of new media platforms enable various forms of participation, mostly in the creation and circulation of media texts (van Dijck, 2009). Participants thereby co-create the values of greatness and specialness through digital storytelling.
Performativity is in this sense quite central to the constitution of ritualised media events. In Butler’s (1988: 520) account, performativity refers to the ‘stylized repetition of acts through time’ and underpins the idea of contingency rather than stable and fixed sets of meanings. Viewing through this lens, ritualised media events are constructed through the narratives of the events themselves (Ytreberg, 2017). Moreover, they are always open to being framed by alternative narratives that by no means reach a final closure of signification (Hall, 1996). In that way media rituals are symbolic spaces of hegemonic struggles over meaning (Hepp and Couldry, 2010).
On networked media platforms, the dynamics of performativity are not only intrinsic to signifying practices but also refer to particular modalities characterised by computer-mediated interactivity within a network of participants. Inasmuch as the narratives of media events are cognitive meaning making practices, digital storytelling is also moulded by the flows of media texts. Digital functionalities of sharing, liking, retweeting and so forth make digital contents publicly manifest. By using these affordances, participants collectively amplify what is being told. More importantly, the uses of these affordances are ‘affective resonances’ (Paasonen, 2020) or ‘reverberations’ (Kunstman, 2021) that give digital storytelling its shape. Intense feelings lead to diverse ways of engaging with the media texts and translate into the ubiquity of retweeting, sharing and liking. Digital storytelling thereupon sets the scene for affect-driven communication.
Affective publics come into existence by virtue of these digital functionalities (Lovelock, 2019; Lünenborg, 2020). The phatic nature of digital communication forms ‘an affective stage of togetherness’ (Lünenborg, 2020: 38) at which participants contingently narrate their imagined collectivity. From the perspective of discursivity, this process is grounded in signifying practices drawing the symbolic boundaries of identities vis-à-vis their cultural and political others, as exemplified by the gendered subject of #MeToo (Dawson, 2020) or anti-immigrant hashtag activism (Adlung et al., 2021). Besides, imagined collectivities are also discursively constructed through the making sense of belonging and solidarity, as illustrated by studies on the self-validation of non-heteronormative identities on Youtube (Lovelock, 2019), or #Occupy movements and the Arab Spring (Papacharissi, 2016; Papacharissi and de Fatima Oliveira, 2012). From the perspective of affectivity, networked publics build upon the interplay of discursive articulations and technological affordances. As Lünenborg (2020) suggests, participants repeat, modify and rearticulate the naratives of media events so that they build a sense of collectivity. These communicative practices do not only serve the signification of collectivity at a symbolic level, but also the intensification of feeling together at an affective level. On that account, affective formations of networked publics are indissociable from the rhythmic character of digital communication.
Rhythm is quite central to the interpretation of affective publics as a ritual process. Dayan and Katz (1992: 112) states that the rhythmic nature of ritual performances ‘plays a role in converting an assembly into a community’. Rhythm creates embodied harmony between the participants. Demanding synchronous and repeated actions, it realigns the bodies and enables the imagination of togetherness.
In networked media, contents are the key instruments in performing the rhythms of media rituals. Repeated uses of posting, sharing and liking content aggregate into affect-driven rhythms of publics. Specific contents in visual, aural or textual forms acquire affective value to the extent that they incite a heightened amount of activity (Valaskivi et al., 2022). As Papacharissi (2016: 317) says in her analysis of the Egyptian uprising, rhythms take ‘the form of a nod, a clap, a nudge, and other forms of affective expression’. Making an analogy with the choruses in Greek tragedy, she states that the rhythmic nature of digital storytelling turns into refrains reproducing the collaborative chants of revolution. Rhythmic chants are thus constitutive acts that shape the cultural intelligibility of affective publics (Ural, 2021). Besides, the rhythms of digital storytelling do not necessarily reproduce and reinforce the structures of meanings but potentially ‘negotiate what is more prominent and needs to be recognized’ (Ural, 2021: 1094). That is to say, the ways that networked publics gain their visibility through the rhythmic chants of digital storytelling is a creative process that modifies and rearticulates the narratives of media events. Therefore, we should consider the rhythms of digital storytelling as constitutive elements of performative construction.
The ritual aspects of affective publics, however, become further convoluted when the mechanisms of algorithms are considered. Media texts do not unrestrictedly flow within the network of participants but are selected, sorted and filtered by algorithms. Algorithmic recommendations conduct the visibility of contents and thus structure networked communication (Bucher, 2012; van Dijck et al., 2018). What is in question here is surely power relations that govern the circulation of media texts. In this sense, digital storytelling is largely ruled by algorithmic power. However, power should not be seen as restrictive but constitutive in that it shapes encounters in networked media (Beer, 2009; Beer and Burrows, 2013; Bucher, 2012). Algorithmic curations both shape and are shaped by the participants’ interactions. Any sort of user activity becomes datafied and processed, and turns into algorithmically curated feeds, recommendations and predictions. This process operates through classificatory techniques datafying friendships, following, posting, sharing, liking, commenting, viewing and so forth. In that way, algorithms calculate ‘being alike’ on the basis of users’ interactions (Lury and Day, 2019). Therefore, algorithmic curations are performative constructs that are constantly dependent on datafication of digital communication (van Dijck et al., 2018).
For understanding the relevance of algorithms for media rituals, we need to see the interplay between platform algorithms and the performative character of digital communication. To do so, we should avoid a technological determinism that disregards the agency of the participants in the formation of networked publics (see Møller Hartley et al., 2021). Instead, the rhythms of media rituals here operate as feedback loops that enable the path-dependent circulation of media texts (Airoldi, 2022). Insofar as participants leave affect-laden digital footprints during communication about the event, algorithms shape patterns of ritualised communication (Couldry and Hepp, 2018). Therefore, algorithmic curations contribute to solidifying performatively constructed affective publics.
The making of affective publics through liminal situations
The assembly of communicative practices through the performative construction of networked media events can best be described as a liminal phase. According to Turner (1969), ritual acts enable a transitional stage in which the ordinary flows of everyday life are temporarily suspended in favour of intense experiences of communal togetherness. In this way, ritual acts instantly elevate subjunctive moods through which a sense of collectivity is created, affirmed and celebrated. For Turner, this is a constitutive process that brings imagined collectivity into existence, particularly in premodern societies, that is largely built upon non-voluntary ritual practices. Yet ritual processes are not completely eliminated in rationalised and secularised societies but emerge as liminal-like -or liminoid in Turner’s words- phenomena associated with voluntary leisure settings in parallel with sharp demarcations of work and play (Turner, 1982). Autonomously developing within cultural domains, liminoid phenomena create a playful setting in which imagined collectivities are culturally innovated and reinforced.
In networked media settings, thickened communication in specific timeframes bears the marks of liminoid phenomena, insofar as ordinary flows of media texts are substituted by the playful arousal of digital storytelling in specific themes. Papacharissi (2015a: 125) rightly adapts such an understanding of liminality to digital storytelling and suggests that . . .storytelling audiences occupy a liminal space, a space of transition, as they contribute to turning an event into a story. But liminality is a temporary state, defined as the midpoint between beginning and end. It is set into motion as an initiated action attempts to undo social structures or conventions, and it ends as the initiated action is (re)integrated into social structure. The ambient, hybrid, and prodused practices of liking, retweeting, liveblogging, endorsing, and opining that are frequently blended into social reactions to news events are also liminal. They present personal and temporary content injections that play their own in part in turning a news event into a story.
Liminality here does not simply indicate expressions of collective sentimentality that validate pre-set values and norms. Uncertainty and ambiguity rather reside in a liminal space that makes room for the potential for creativity. Digital storytelling as a liminal space, in Papacharissi’s account, entails a discursive site in which the meanings of media events are repeatedly remade and unmade. Yet Papacharissi disregards Turner’s conception of liminality generating affectively charged communal bonds. Therefore, her understanding stays away from the conceit of liminality evoking communal feelings and bringing affective publics into existence. In her conceptual framework, liminality is not efficiently concatenated with the formations of affective publics.
Notwithstanding, as Turner (1969) suggests, liminality enhances subjunctive moods that consequentially translate into the formation of communitas. This is a spontaneous and immediate formation that usually falls into routines and then disappears. Despite having the potential of a more tenacious presence turning into an ‘ideological communitas’ sharing utopian ideas or a ‘normative communitas’ organised into subcultural form, spontaneous communitas is short-lived and ephemeral. It gives rise to the ‘essential We’ (Turner, 1969: 137) that unpredictably arises by virtue of affective investments. Emerging through ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner, 1969: 107) liminal situations, it stems from a phase in which structured order is temporarily suspended, individualities are anonymised and differences are blurred. These liminal situations set the scene for a spontaneous and ephemeral constitution of communitas.
In this sense of the term, spontaneous communitas is analogous to the concept of affective publics. Being performatively constructed at certain times, affective publics emerge through digital communication within a network of participants, who have shared interests and similar intentions that are usually expressed in the form of public outbursts. The ways that media texts are created and circulated, in this process, demonstrate three qualities, namely commitment, anonymity and uniformity. First, affective publics come into existence by means of the repeated use of texts and images, which requires the continuous, albeit voluntary, efforts of participants. The ubiquity of the same or similar contents derives from the determined commitment of the participants. Second, the platforms’ affordances for reproducing media texts (such as retweeting, sharing or liking) fabricate a collaboratively curated artefact in which the voices of individual contributors may not be discretely heard. There are surely ‘initiators’ (Jackson and Foucault Welles, 2016: 400) starting and enticing digital communication. Yet, the role of initiation is only attributed to specific figures by the participants themselves. They are thus ‘crowdsourced elites’ (Jackson and Foucault Welles, 2016: 403) promoted by anonymous participants. Therefore, affective publics’ narratives are deeply rooted in the anonymous narrators themselves. Last but not the least, affective publics produce their own uniformity out of media texts. Although every single post may be unique, it simultaneously shares some characteristics with others. To set an example, hashtagging is the most obvious way of ensuring uniformity in communicative practices. While disregarding the plurality of meanings within a hashtag campaign, the hashtagged corpus of media texts develops into a whole as a narrative of affective publics.
Understanding liminal phases of affective publics through the terms commitment, anonymity and uniformity does not necessarily implicate the formation of a monologic, stable and univocal discourse. Digital storytelling is indeed a non-linear process that is readily open to further articulations (Couldry, 2008). That said, we may consider the explanatory potential of a Turnerian understanding of liminality that allows for uncertainty and ambiguity to some extent as worth elaboration. Therefore, rituals’ liminal phases accommodate creativity that emanates from intense experiences of community. These experiences are largely fuelled by a commitment, anonymity and uniformity that opens up space for the re-creation and celebration of an imagined collectivity.
Conclusion
Reconsidering the temporality, performativity and liminality of media rituals in this age of networked media, this article suggests that a greater attention to ritualisation aids in the capturing of the processual formation of affective publics. As recent scholarship has eloquently shown (see Lünenborg, 2020), in order to adequately understand the dynamics of affective publics, a Habermasian conception of public sphere has its limits, for it gives priority to deliberate discursivity over sentimental motives. Therefore, such an understanding barely considers affectivity in networked discourse. If this is so, rethinking networked discourse through the lens of ritualisation effectively delves into the affectivity of the formation of networked publics. To specify, the temporal separation of media rituals, the performative construction of ritualised events and liminal situations are very much central to the formation of affective publics. First, ritual temporality herein refers to ambient concentrations that create a breach in the ordinary flow of media texts. Networked ambience cultivates a discursive site in which publics come into existence at specific times. Second, performativity implicates the affect-driven rhythms of digital storytelling feeding algorithmic curations that form embodied harmony between the participants and a sense of collectively felt togetherness. Third, liminality entails ambiguous situations that enable the formation of affective publics by means of the voluntary commitment, anonymity and uniformity of participants.
The ritual dynamics of affective publics, viewed through this lens, seem more attuned to understanding spontaneous and unpredictable formations. In that sense, this way of thinking runs parallel to scholarly interest in the event-based analysis of networked media scrutinising cultural events, terror attacks, elections, or public debates over diverse topics. However, ritual communication may also have a recursive pattern that emerges through a number of events, be it pre-planned and calendrical, or unpredictably repetitive. A deeper scrutiny for ritual dynamics within diverse events would help us in capturing a more vigorous constructions of publics, which is reminiscent of the ideological or normative communitas in Turner’s account.
