Manufacturing Panic: Affect and Contagion through Weather News
Given the intense emphasis on weather forecast news in the US media, this study will approach the news as “affective mediated phenomenon” in a search for the problems which motivates practices or depletions. Through the ontological readings of ‘affect’ in the recent literature on “affective turn”, i...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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MI-AN Publishing
2015-09-01
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| Series: | Kultura (Skopje) |
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| Online Access: | http://journals.cultcenter.net/index.php/culture/article/view/166 |
| Summary: | Given the intense emphasis on weather forecast news in the US media, this study will approach the news as “affective mediated phenomenon” in a search for the problems which motivates practices or depletions. Through the ontological readings of ‘affect’ in the recent literature on “affective turn”, it aims to open up a new platform to analyze the fundamentals of relationality within televised and online weather forecasting and their extension in the society. I will focus on the Facebook group “Stop the Weather Channel from naming Winter Storms” which was created as a resistance to the everyday production of affective threat-values of The Weather Channel (TWC)’s naming of storms. I will analyze both the shared images from TV (via YouTube videos) and user comments on them utilizing Brian Massumi’s notion of “affective facts” and Anna Gibbs’ notion of “affect-contagion”. I will argue that, weather news produces affective registers which trigger continuous processes of re-making of the bodies as if it is a real situation. Thus, through the affective reality of anticipated alternatives created by weather news, performative threat-value of the thought-signs increases. I will show instances of mimetic relations between the bodies as anxiety formation through the portrayals of practices of emptying supermarkets, showing “signs” through visualized narration of cloud movements, and live-connections to the “scene”. Media’s emphasis on faces, values and rhythms of resonance with the portrayed bodies in anxiety from the previous storms works as an activation contour of affect-contagion. Weather news produces a form of subjectivity through affective mediations of technical means which amplifies audiences. |
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| ISSN: | 1857-7717 1857-7725 |