Post digital Emotion (Affective Economies by Sara Ahmed: Connections to Brexit, twitter, and modern tribalism.)


“Here a subject (the white nationalist, the average white man, the white housewife, the white working man, the white citizen, and the white Christian farmer) is presented as endangered by imagined others whose proximity threatens not only to take something away from the subject (jobs, security, wealth), but to take the place of the subject. In other words, the
presence of these others is imagined as a threat to the object of love”

The above quote from this reading was undertaken in Nazi Germany in the 1940’s, but in a lot of ways I feel that it still rings true today. With Brexit taking the forefront of our political and socio-geographic landscape at the moment, xenophobia, racism and politics of fear have been used to coerce people’s feelings in regards to immigrants and people of different ethnic groups. The BBC reported that following the Brexit vote, “33 out of 44 British police forces saw their highest levels of hate crime reports since the current system of records began in 2012”, moreover there was 29% spike recorded in hate crimes in the twelve months before March 2017, compared to the same period between 2015-2016. That’s a rise from 62,518 (still not ideal) to 80,393 (completely disgusting).


The concept of post-digital emotion seems to lead to an influx of ‘mob mentality’. The extreme right wing of the political spectrum can openly state their beliefs and opinions as though they were fact on social platforms such as twitter or Facebook. As is the case with many social media networks, lies are easy to spread. Following the release of Black Panther, numerous people fled to twitter to tell tales of bullying and assault which they encountered in their local cinemas. It only took a reverse image search of these tweets to reveal they were lies. One featuring a bloodied tissue which had been uploaded to the internet nine years ago, another took imagery from a Serbian domestic abuse advert, another (below) stole imagery from a news story about a Swedish nightclub.


The response to these tweets was largely to mock and ridicule the original posters, poking fun at how they’d lied by creating similar tweets with obviously fake imagery (see below)


Nobody likes being made fun of on the internet, especially not racists. The responses to their fake tweets, although funny to one half of twitter, were not funny to the other: they drew a line in the sand and caused further division. If the ‘average white man’ in the Nazi report is anything like that of today, then there is still a fear that other ethnic groups will somehow take the place of the subject (the white man) and take something away from the white man. Although a racist white man will physically lose nothing from the existence of a black man, concepts of social tribalism will cause the white man to feel as though he has lost his rank in his tribe. Neo-tribalism (or modern tribalism) expresses that people have evolved not to live as a mass society, but to conform to smaller society circles, “tribes”.

Michel Maffesoli’s concepts of neo-tribalism highlight that neo-tribes are ‘communities of feeling’. When other white people are more willing to defend a black person, than mindlessly defend a white person even if they are in the wrong, a racist white person would feel like their tribe was falling apart.
Tribalism also has links to concepts of tradition. Colonialism and the conquest of the world at the hands of white people is (or at least needs to be) a thing of the past. White people do not hold the same position of power socially now as they did two hundred, one hundred, even fifty years ago. Tradition and the extension of behaviors from years ago into modern day, can be damaging.  Post-modern feeling allows all people to connect with others who feel the same as they do. Racists from all around the planet have a platform where they can openly feel a certain way about non-white people, and as they have found like-minded others, they believe their way of thinking is normal, when it is actually just dangerous and outdated.




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neotribalism
https://twitter.com/AkinasEightSix/status/964552801916477440?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2F2018%2F2%2F19%2F17029742%2Fblack-panther-fake-assault-stories-twitter-response-mockery-humor&tfw_site=verge
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/19/17029742/black-panther-fake-assault-stories-twitter-response-mockery-humor
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/black-panther-racism-trolls-fake-news-twitter-race-attacks-whites-assaulted-film-movie-screenings-a8215226.html
http://time.com/4671773/brexit-hate-crimes-united-kingdom/
http://time.com/4985332/hate-crime-uk-2017/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38976087
http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/1619/morag_mckerron.pdf?sequence=1

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