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Affectivity in Media-Based Public Discussions: A Critical Phenomenological Analysis

  • Minna-Kerttu Maarja Kekki ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: July 15, 2022

Abstract

Affectivity has become an operative concept for a variety of analyses of our everyday media-based public communications. However, it often remains unclear what affectivity is and how it can be used for analysing media-based public discussions. To clarify the role of affectivity in such analyses, I take a look back to the classical phenomenological analyses of affectivity provided by Edmund Husserl. I argue that based on Husserl’s analyses, affectivity is essentially a relation between the object and the affected subject evoking (sometimes emotional) responses in the subject. Accordingly, the role of affectivity in the opinion formation and other similar processes in media-based public discussions can be analysed as contingent sedimentations of the object’s such relations to the subject. As my analysis demonstrates, analyses of affectivity in the context of media-based communications do not capture their research object—affectivity—if affectivity is conceived as a feature of the media contents and not as a modality of experience.


Corresponding author: Minna-Kerttu Maarja Kekki, Faculty of education, University of Oulu, Pentti Kaiteran katu 1, 90014, Oulu, Finland, E-mail:

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Published Online: 2022-07-15
Published in Print: 2022-11-25

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