Affective Transformations: Politics - Algorithms - Media

Has the Affective Turn itself turned sour? Two seemingly contradictory developments serve as starting points for this volume. First, technologies from affective computing to social robotics focus on the recognition and modulation of human affectivity. Affect gets measured, calculated, controlled. Second, we witness a deeply concerning rise in hate speech, cybermobbing, and incitement to violence via social media. Affect gets mobilized, fomented, unleashed. Politics has become affective to such an extent that we need to rethink our regimes of affect organization. Media and Affect Studies now have to prove that they can cope with the return of the affective real.

Bernd Bösel is a postdoc researcher at the University of Potsdam, with a focus on philosophy, media studies and culture theory, and has been teaching in the joint curriculum "European Media Studies," a collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, since 2015. Between 2016 and 2018 he coordinated the DFG-funded research network "Affect- and Psychotechnology Studies."