Pademic, Internet and Emotions: Politics of sensibilities and commodification of audiences

Abstract

On March 11, 2019, the World Health Organization declared the status of a pandemic for the rapid expansion of COVID-19. In a short period of time, the daily lives of billions of people around the world would never be the same: the successive strategies that were adopted in different countries implied significant changes in most of the subjects´ daily experiences, from the way of working to the family relationship itself. Most of the situations of interactions in the context of the pandemic are carried out in virtual contexts, and specifically through social networks. Thus, COVID-19 is imposed as a recurring "topic of discussion": WhatsApp groups, Facebook, etc. are filled with messages and discussions about it. Thinking in terms of social research, it is possible to imagine a Big Data strategy to analyze the traceability of messages, and to map the density of the circulation of information. However, it is also possible to ask ourselves some questions that seek the qualitative meanings of the practice of receiving and re-sending messages related to the subject, while taking into account its relationship with their form. In this direction, the objective of this chapter is to analyze the emotions linked to the interactions in social networks associated with COVID-19. To do this, we applied a self-administered survey to 307 respondents in 17 European countries, selected using the snowball sampling technique between March 17th and April 18th, where we inquired about how people feel when they receive/send information related to the pandemic. Given the multiple possible interpretations, we are interested in linking some discussions around digital labor, that is, the ability of social networks to market to an audience. This means emphasizing one of the ways these media have, in the framework of the renewed and massive situations of digital interaction, of capturing people´s energies and transforming them into merchandise (Fuchs, 2014). The analysis focuses on the fact that what is commercialized is the willingness to be part of a group that receives messages, so it is not enough to just know the quantifiable dimension of the action of forwarding, but also what is at stake is the relationship between the objective field and the willingness of the subjects to be part of these audiences. Therefore, beyond the re-production of the practice (whether it is re-sent or not re-sent), we are interested here in exploring how the qualitative sense that agents give to it could be associated with policies of digital sensibilities (Scribano and Lisdero, 2019). That is, perceptions framed in specific regimes of sensibilities that allow connecting bodily geometries with grammars of action (Scribano, 2017) that have a specific support and content in the digital field. This allows us to advance in the description of "platform sensibilities" as a sign of the ongoing social structuration processes.