Feeling-Into the Civic Body: Affect, Emotions and Moods

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter accounts for the energising role of affect, emotions and moods in circulating false information throughout the civic body. It starts by charting the trajectory of the role of feelings in understanding citizen-political communications. Their persuasive importance was recognised millennia ago and have been recognised anew in recent decades with the advent of neuroscience and the understanding that emotions are important for decisions and judgements. The chapter highlights three main mechanisms through which governments can try to manage public feeling and hence behaviour: discursive, decision-making based and datafied. It then considers the prevalent claim that we live in a post-truth condition (where appeals to emotion and personal belief are more influential in shaping public opinion than objective facts). While the relative importance of emotion and facts in everyday life is difficult to ascertain, the chapter demonstrates that the media from which people would normally derive their facts (namely, news media and social media) have become more emotionalised and affective, and suggests that we live in an informational environment that is sub-optimal for a healthy civic body. Finally, the chapter examines the challenges faced by governments in managing their population’s feelings during the COVID-19 pandemic where uncertainty, anxiety and false information proliferate.