Digitality, Visual Rhetoric and Affect Circulation in Contemporary Social Movements

Among social movements, Internet became a main platform for activism and public outreach as well as for communication between protesters. Today, people can participate in the movement through Internet and interact with other people online. In most cases, visuals are instrumental for this interaction both within and across movements, contributing to or changing the emotional climate for the activists. A growing number of scholars are interested in the studies towards collective and individual emotions as being central and determinant for the extent of people’s involvement. Visuals, as part of the increased use of art materials in social movements since the 1960s, construct affective rhetoric around images and symbols, and create collective bonds, providing the activist with space for everyday resistance. While there are studies on affect in protests through artistic practice, reconsidering this relation with regard to trans-nationalization of affect can give us an interesting perspective in the study of social movements. In order to understand how movements evolved with the popularization of Internet, we should look at how concepts of everyday and totality function for the activist when fully engaged with cyberspace. Focusing primarily on the recent protests in Greece and Turkey, this proposal suggests analyzing affective expressions created around online visuals and how they are transmitted from one social movement context to another. The conditions of production and distribution of images on digital platforms, and the activists’ experience in being a producer, receiver and/or multiplier are the core topics of this study.