Manufacturing Panic: Affect and Contagion through Weather News
Abstract
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.References
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[2] F. Berardi, After the Future. G. Genosko, and N. Thoburn, Eds., Baltimore: AK Press, 2011.
[3] J. Bratich, “Amassing the multitude: Revisiting early audience studies,” Communication Theory, 15(3), 242-265, 2005.
[4] J. Bratich, “User-generated discontent: Convergence, polemology and dissent,” Cultural Studies, 25(4-5), 621-640, 2011.
[5] P. T. Clough, “Introduction,” in P. T. Clough and J. Halley Eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (pp. 1-34). Duke University, 2007.
[6] P. T. Clough, “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedieated body”. [Online]. Available: http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/management/documents/research/research-units/cppe/seminar-pdfs/2005/clough.pdf.
[7] P. T. Clough, “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies,” in M. Gregg and G. J. Seigworth, Eds., The Affect Theory Reader (pp. 206-229), Duke University Press, 2010.
[8] M. Coté, and J. Pybus, “Learning to immaterial labour 2.0: Facebook and social networks,” Cognitive capitalism, education and digital labor, 169-193, 2011.
[9] M. Featherstone, “Body, image and affect in consumer culture,” Body & Society, 16(1), 193-221, 2010.
[10] M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. M. Senellart Ed., NY: Picador, 2007.
[11] M. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79. M. Senellart, Ed., NY: Macmillan, 2008.
[12] M. Hardt, “Foreword: What affects are good for,” in P. T. Clough and J. Halley, Eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (pp. ix-xii). Duke University, 2007.
[13] A. Gibbs, “Panic! Affect contagion, mimesis and suggestion in the social field,” Cultural Studies Review, 14(2), 130-45, 2008.
[14] A. Gibbs, “Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication,” in M. Gregg and G. J. Seigworth Eds., The Affect Theory Reader (pp. 186-206). Duke University Press, 2010.
[15] A. Gibbs, “Affect Theory and Audience,” in V. Nightingale, Ed., The Handbook of Media Audiences (pp. 251-267). Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
[16] D. Green, (2012) “The Dialectic of Weather Channel.” [Online]. Available: http://flowtv.org/2012/02/dialectic-of-the-weather-channel/
[17] F. Guattari, Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Indiana University Press, 1995.
[18] M. Kavka, Reality television, affect and intimacy: Reality matters. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
[19] B. Massumi, Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Duke University Press Books, 2002.
[20] B. Massumi, “Fear (the spectrum said),” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 13(1), 31-48, 2005.
[21] B. Massumi, “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat,” in M. Gregg and G. J. Seigworth, Eds., The Affect Theory Reader (pp. 52- 71). Duke University Press, 2010.
[22] T. Miller, “Tomorrow will be … Risky and Disciplined,” in J. Friedman, Ed., Reality Squared: Televisual Discourse on the Real (pp. 203 -221). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
[23] J.M. Prada. (2006) “Economies of Affectivity.” [Online]. Available: http://info. interactivist. net/node/5382.
[24] E. Shouse, (2005) “Feeling, emotion, affect” M/C Journal, 8(6). [Online]. Available: http://www.journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php.
[25] V. Sobchack, Carnal thoughts: Embodiment and moving image culture. University of California Press, 2004.
[26] D. W. Smythe, “On the audience commodity and its work,” in M. G. Durham and M. Kellner, Eds., Media and cultural studies: Keyworks, (pp. 230-257), Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
[27] M. Sturken, (1998) “Desiring the Weather: El Niño, the Media, and California Identity.” [Online]. Available: http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/SC2/pdf/sturken.pdf.
[28] N. Thrift, “Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect,” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86(1), 57-78, 2004.
[29] P. Vannini, and A. M. Mccright, “Technologies of the sky: a socio-semiotic and critical analysis of televised weather discourse,” Critical Discourse Studies, 4(1), 49-74, 2007.
[30] P. Vannini, D. Waskul, S. Gottschalk, and T. Ellis-Newstead, “Making Sense of the Weather Dwelling and Weathering on Canada’s Rain Coast,” Space and Culture, 15(4), 361-380, 2012.
[31] E. Wissinger, (2007) “Modelling a way of life: Immaterial and affective labor in the fashion modeling industry.” [Online]. Available: http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/7-1/7-1wissinger.pdf.
Published
2015-09-15
How to Cite
OKTEN, Alptug.
Manufacturing Panic: Affect and Contagion through Weather News.
Култура/Culture, [S.l.], v. 5, n. 11, p. 77-90, sep. 2015.
ISSN 1857-7725.
Available at: <http://journals.cultcenter.net/index.php/culture/article/view/166>. Date accessed: 19 feb. 2025.
Section
English Articles
Keywords
Affective turn, media theory, media and culture, weather news, contagion

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