Carsten Stage
Aarhus University
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Featured researches published by Carsten Stage.
Memory Studies | 2013
Britta Timm Knudsen; Carsten Stage
In this article, we analyze 28 YouTube video tributes to fallen Danish soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq with two analytical goals. The goals are to first understand how the soldier as an object of communal grief is affectively and discursively established, discussed, and challenged in the videos and comments, and second to investigate what type of commemorative practices the specific media space of YouTube enables. Our first observation is that the videos’ attempts to construct the soldiers as national heroes and common objects of grief are repeatedly disputed and opposed by the people commenting on them. Our second point is that YouTube allows for a new type of commemorative practice, which, unlike the traditional war monuments of the nation-state, is marked by explicit differences of opinion concerning the status and legitimacy of the war. The analysis draws on theoretical insights from the fields of affect theory, participatory culture, DIY media, and memory studies.
Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory | 2013
Carsten Stage
The aim of the article is to investigate whether the concept of the ‘crowd’ as developed by Gustave Le Bon can help us understand the new types of affectively charged collectivities created via spontaneous interaction on various social media platforms. To do this I analyze the case of Eva Dien Brine Markvoorts blog, 65 Red Roses, through the lens of crowd psychology. Initially I make a theoretical distinction between three different types of crowds that prioritize the role of physical co-presence in different ways: the traditional body-to-body crowd based on physical co-presence; the mediated crowd, which has a strong offline dimension but uses media technologies as tools or communication environments; and the online crowd, which I define as the affective unification and relative synchronization of a public in relation to a specific online site. Overall I argue that Eva Markvoort enables collective affective processes that can be identified in the responses on the blog, and that she functions as a crowd facilitator, motivating both linguistic and bodily imitation due to her personal prestige and her image-producing embodiment of an abstract disease and problem. On a theoretical level, I conclude that Le Bons description of the crowd is productive when trying to transpose insights from crowd psychology into a cultural situation characterized by spontaneous and affective relations online.
Archive | 2015
Britta Timm Knudsen; Carsten Stage
The motivation for this anthology is a challenge raised in the growing volume of academic work on affective processes — or what is often termed ‘the affective turn’ in contemporary cultural analysis (Clough, 2007; Thrift, 2008; Gregg and Seigworth, 2010; Brennan, 2004; Massumi, 2002; Blackman, 2012; Wethereil, 2012; Leys, 2011; Ahmed, 2004). The challenge under discussion is how to develop and account for methodologies that enable cultural researchers to investigate affective processes in relation to a certain empirical study. The collection’s main methodological focus is thus how to perform empirically grounded affect research. We define an affective method as an innovative strategy for (1) asking research questions and formulating research agendas relating to affective processes, for (2) collecting or producing embodied data and for (3) making sense of this data in order to produce academic knowledge. The aim of this edited collection is therefore not to challenge or deconstruct established methodological categories (e.g., research questions, data production and data analysis), but rather to begin experimenting with how these categories can be used and reinterpreted in inventive ways in order to engage with the immaterial and affective processes of social life. The chapters in the collection deal with the various elements of this definition in different ways: some focus more on starting points and asking questions, others more on the production or sense-making of data through the use of new analytical and conceptual approaches.
Archive | 2017
Carsten Stage
Much academic work on illness narratives has focused on narration as a kind of affective stabilization or therapeutic relief in the wake of a chaotic experience of illness. In this chapter complicates this understanding by highlighting the more stressing and ambiguous affects of narrating cancer online by focusing on the Danish Kemoland.dk, which describes the cancer treatment of the daughter of the blogger, and the way this blog has affected the blogger in various ways. The chapter investigates four non-relief-oriented affective-emotional practices related to the case: (1) Anger and hurt: intensities related to being verbally confronted in- or outside the blog based on content provided on the blog; (2) Fakes and hoaxes: intensities motivated by other users stealing or using content or elements from the blog for their own purposes; (3) Dynamics of support, negativity and lost networks: intensities produced due to the desire to create and maintain a high level of comfort and collective attention or through losing old networks while building new ones around the blog; (4) The intensities of public writing: Ambiguous intensities connected to the act of public writing, for instance when times of crisis paradoxically produce the most intense writing experience and enhance the energy of the writer, or when a lack of public writing creates an almost abstinence-like state or a sense of not sensing the world as deeply.
Journal of Aesthetics & Culture | 2012
Carsten Stage
Abstract The article is based on the analysis of user-generated videos from a particular event: the Lady Gaga concert in Denmark on October 20, 2010. Within the theoretical framework of a media practice perspective, theories of a media cultural movement from sign to signal, and an affective understanding of the experience of liveness, I argue that the DIY videos do not only attest to the documentation or representation of the concert event, but rather show an urge to feel it, connect to it, and relate to others by sharing it. In that way media and screens can be understood as technologies that under certain circumstances enable intensified relations between bodies, spaces, and significant others. The experiential intensification of the event is established by using media to (1) visually enrich the real-time experience, (2) turn the collective receiver into an individualized and creative real-time auteur, and (3) deterritorialize the real-time experience by sharing it on social media platforms. Furthermore, I discuss two ways of analyzing “the signal” in my material: one focusing on the relation between body, event, and mobile media technology and the other on the formal features of the videos themselves. This distinction is nevertheless purely analytical given that the formal traces of the signal (the sensory turbulence of the videos) are so closely related to the spatially affected camera-body. The body in the space, the camera, and the audiovisual surface is in other words affecting each other, as the signaletic force of the concert-event affects all the three. Carsten Stage, Assistant Professor, Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University. His research interests are cultural and media globalization, affective online communication, participatory and DIY culture. Recent publications: Tegningekrisen—som mediebegivenhed og danskhedskamp (trans. The cartoon crisis—as media event and national identity struggle) (2011), “Contagious bodies. Affective and discursive strategies in contemporary online activism” (co-authored with Britta Timm Knudsen) in Emotion, Space and Society (2011), and “Thingifying Neda. The construction of commemorative and affective thingifications of Neda Agda Soltan” in Culture Unbound (2011).
Archive | 2018
Carsten Stage; Tina Thode Hougaard
This book investigates the language created in Facebook groups that relate shared experiences of illness, dying and mourning. It develops a theoretical and analytical framework for understanding the use and rhythms of emojis, interjections and other forms of “intensive” writing in social media of this kind.
Archive | 2017
Carsten Stage
This chapter takes a visual approach and investigates the open source art project La Cura, by Italian artist Salvatore Iaconesi, who invited an array of followers to co-produce a new or more inclusive understanding of what a “cure” might mean, and the social media communication of Swedish blogger and actor Fabian Bolin, who shared the story of being diagnosed with leukaemia on his blog and Facebook profile, which became the starting point of the creation of a global storytelling platform for cancer patients. These cases share interest in the use of networked visuals—especially the selfie and the scan—to understand illness experience and create public attention around cancer and in building collaborative platforms for sharing diverse and embodied experiences of cancer. They also exemplify how the internet and social media are technologies for both experimenting with the affective permeability and mobilizing power of “fascinating” body images and for (re)defining the subjective surface of the body as the carrier of experienced individuality during illness.
Archive | 2017
Carsten Stage
This chapter focuses on the role of social media platforms that transform from being about sharing illness narratives to being sites of commemoration, mourning and digital heritage maintenance after the death of the blogger. Inspired by recent developments in death studies, posthuman theories and material participation, the chapter shows how the platforms challenge existing notions of what a deceased human being is and can do. The article uses Henri Lefebvre’s rhythm-analytical approach to show the way the platforms allow for the continuation and re-actualization of the bloggers’ life rhythms, even after their death, turning the bloggers into socially present subjects post-mortem. A point, which is supported by the comments the bloggers “receive” post-mortem. These commemorative practices challenge a simple binary between the continuity of life and the discontinuity of death in favour of a logic of “a-liveness”, where continuity is mixed with discontinuity, presence with absence. The chapter concludes by investigating the problem of succession that the relatives face after the death of the blogger. This is done through Max Weber’s concept of charisma and his typology of ways to succeed the charismatic leader; for instance through “hereditary charisma” (letting a family member take over) or by the transformation of charismatic authority into either rational-legal or traditional forms of authority.
Archive | 2017
Carsten Stage
The chapter offers a review of existing research on cancer patients’ use of the internet and various social media platforms. It furthermore identifies a theoretical lack in the existing literature about illness, narrative and social media communication by arguing that it seems to overlook the fact that a new type of entrepreneurial and activist blogger is entering the spaces of illness communication on social media. This theoretical claim is validated by a close investigation of “entrepreneurial cancer blogs” produced by Rosie Kilburn (UK) and Jessica Joy Rees (US), which both create socio-economic value by fostering actions among receivers to the benefit of a cause that transgresses the personal needs and local horizon of the blogger. I claim that these blogs are using affective intensity as a vehicle for ‘soft’ political engagement theorized as “connective action” (Papacharissi 2015; Bennett and Segerberg 2012), but that this type of (semi-)public affect is also dilemmatic. On the one hand public affect is important for the creation of the positive social and psychological changes made by the blogs. On the other hand the intensity of the blog environments risks supporting a privatization of political problems due to the focus on individual struggles and solutions.
Archive | 2017
Carsten Stage
The chapter develops the key point in Chap. 2 by arguing that the new entrepreneurial forms of illness communication are challenging the well-known “sick role” described by Talcott Parsons in favour of more activist and participatory illness voices. It, however, moves the focus from blogs to social network sites, primarily Facebook. The chapter more specifically makes a case study of the English (micro)blogger Stephen Sutton, and discusses his way of handling life-threatening cancer, which resulted in the crowdfunding of almost five million GBP for the Teenage Cancer Trust. The chapter investigates various ways of explaining and analysing the crowdfunding success and virality of the Sutton-case (Nahon and Hemsley 2013) and the performative role of measurement and numbers in this process of ‘going viral’. Nikolas Rose’s concept of “biological citizenship” is introduced to establish an analytical framework capable of grasping the rising tendency to intertwine intimate pathographies with social, economic or political projects. This concept is chosen because it allows us to reflect on the maintenance of vitality, happiness and hope as key components of a contemporary biopolitics that affects and transforms current illness practices, but also on the quite contradictory reactions to Sutton’s project, that can be detected in the material.