Jacob Johanssen

Not belonging to one’s self: Affect on Facebook’s site governance page

This article makes a contribution to a growing number of works that discuss affect and social media. I use Freudian affect theory to analyse user posts on the public Site Governance Facebook page. Freud’s work may help us to explore the affectivity within the user narratives and I suggest that they are expressions of alienation, dispossession and powerlessness that relate to the users’ relations with Facebook as well as to their internal and wider social relations. The article thus introduces a new angle on studies of negative user experiences that draws on psychoanalysis and critical theory.

“I Am Burning, I Am Burning”: Affect, acid attacks and British tabloid newspapers

This article draws on studies that explore forms of contemporary journalism which focus on the role played by the expression of emotions and feelings. We present results from a qualitative study which examined how British tabloid newspapers covered acid attacks on women between 2010 and 2016. Drawing on the notion of affect, we explore the extent to which journalists try to turn painful embodied states into rational discourse. The data analysed suggest that such experiences cannot be completely captured by language. The journalists make use of particular narrative strategies focusing on the incident of the attack by highlighting how pain was experienced by the individual. This often results in the women being singled out and isolated. While there is some discussion of the contexts in which the violence occurred, the wider socio-cultural background is absent from the articles. We conclude that the focus on intense pain in the articles may enable a particular affective relationality to emerge that is felt by victims, journalists and audiences alike.

Gaming–playing on social media: using the psychoanalytic concept of ‘playing’ to theorize user labour on Facebook

ABSTRACT Political economists have argued that user activity on corporate social media is regarded as labour that appears playful and fun but is exploited and sold to advertisers for profit maximization. This article begins with the working assumption that such user labour on social media constitutes a form of playing. It is theorized through a psychoanalytic perspective on the term as developed by D. W. Winnicott and André Green. The notion of gaming–playing is put forward to account for set interface structures on Facebook that resemble a game as well as free-flowing dimensions more akin to playing. Some user discourses on Facebook are analysed through this prism. A psychoanalytic conceptualization of user labour as playing allows one to analyse both positive discourses that emphasize Facebook as a space for creativity, exploration and the unknown, as well as negative discourses that critique the platform with regard to lacking privacy controls or data ownership. Both discourses are conducted in a playful manner that creatively utilize a sense of user agency in relation to others and Facebook itself, but often remain without consequences.

Media research and psychoanalysis: A suggestion:

This short commentary outlines psychoanalysis as a theory and method and its potential value to media research. Following Dahlgren, it is suggested that psychoanalysis may enrich the field because it may offer a complex theory of the human subject, as well as methodological means of doing justice to the richness, ambivalence and contradictions of human experience in relation to media. The psychoanalytic technique of free association and how it has been adapted in social research is suggested as a means to open up subjective modes of expression and thinking –- in researchers and research participants alike – that lie beyond rationality and conscious agency.

Thinking (with) the unconscious in media and communication studies: Introduction to the special issue

Under the title Digital Media, Psychoanalysis and the Subject, this special issue of CM: Communication and Media seeks to reassess and reinvigorate psychoanalytic thinking in media and communication studies. We undertake this reassessment with a particular focus on the question of what psychoanalytic concepts, theories as well as modes of inquiry can contribute to the study of digital media. Overlooking the field of media and communication studies, we argue that psychoanalysis offers a reservoir of conceptual and methodological tools that has not been sufficiently tapped. In particular, psychoanalytic perspectives offer a heightened concern and sensibility for the unconscious, i.e. the element in human relating and relatedness that criss-crosses and mars our best laid plans and reasonable predictions. This introduction provides an insight into psychoanalysis as a discipline, indicates the ways in which it has been adopted in media research in general and research into digital media in particular and, ultimately, points to its future potential to contribute to the field.