21 Round Table: Overheated medialities Moral outrage in the attention economy

Chair: Joschka Philipps, Kingsley Jima

Attention may well be amongst the most valuable and sought-after commodities in today’s global-capitalist economy. What attracts attention particularly effectively, a plethora of studies argue, is moral outrage, the emotion we feel when a moral norm is being violated. Algorithm-driven social media technologies, seeking to maximize and exploit human attentional resources, thus thrive on emotional and morally framed content. On Twitter, it is argued, every moral and emotional word in a tweet is associated with an average increase of 20% in its diffusion (Brady et al. 2017:7315). While social media are at the forefront of such dynamics of moral overheating, they also change the role and function of classic media that are being commented on and absorbed into social media debates. If we consider medialities as constitutive of relations, moral outrage in public debates is not merely a separate object of analysis out there. It affects our very own subjectivities, shapes the ways in which we relate to the world and informs, not least, our academic work and relationships. Indeed, the politicization of various systems of thought, the polarization between real or imagined camps, the sense of urgency in the face of ubiquitous wrongdoing and crisis are cases in point for the ways in which medialities prioritize specific epistemologies and marginalize alternative perspectives (Africa Multiple n.d.:34). One may go as far as arguing that the project of reconfiguring, be it with regards to African Studies or the ecological-economic order, decolonization or reconfiguring religious attitudes to life, is a moral figure born out of moral outrage in the face of existing conditions.

Given this ubiquity of overheated medialities, the goal of addressing them is not necessarily to take a moral position for or against these dynamics—they are what they are. Rather, as Janet Roitman (2014:13) highlights with regards to the concept of “crisis”, the aim lies in “asking questions about how we produce significance for ourselves”: how are mediated and mediatized moralizations part of reconfiguring and how do we deal with them in our research, cooperation and academic outputs?

Panelists:

• Joyce Nyairo
• Eunice Kamaara
• Justin Ouoro
• Larissa Kojoué
• Wienke Strathern (tbd)

Cited Literature
Africa Multiple. n.d. "Africa Multiple: Reconfiguring African Studies” Cluster of Excellence: Structures, Concepts, Themes. Bayreuth: University of Bayreuth.
Brady, William J., Julian A. Wills, John T. Jost, Joshua A. Tucker, and Jay J. Van Bavel. 2017. ‘Emotion Shapes the Diffusion of Moralized Content in Social Networks’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114(28):7313–18. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1618923114.
Roitman, Janet L. 2014. Anti-Crisis. Durham: Duke University Press.