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Paper short abstract:

I will discuss how a culture of speaking publicly about emotions on social media paradoxically led to de-solidarization, aggression and silencing of positions during the first months of Russo-Ukrainian war and show the dynamics of how isolated affective ecologies formed on different social media.

Paper long abstract:

Affective cultures become extremely important during crises because they help to resituate the border between “us” and “them”, recruit new members into affective communities and strengthen the ties within them. Collective sharing of emotions form discursive norms of speaking about affect. But also normative sets of emotions are formed that often differ between even close affective communities on a same digital platform.

Since the start of Russo-Ukrainian war a paradoxical situation formed on social media. Feeling and publicly sharing emotions are considered to be a norm in social media, supported by therapy culture and “new sincerety”. Yet the sets of normative emotions and discoursive practices to express them became so unstable that every attempt to explicate emotion led to a dispute, and rather to exclusion and trauma than inclusion into an affective community.

Basing on analysis of other 4 mln texts in social media and a set of 32 interviews, I shall discuss how people developed the practices of talking about their emotions – and of their political views through emotions during the first months of the war, and how these texts became managed, censured, and suppressed both by their authors and other people around them on social media, how the idea of the right for emotion” and subsequent inequality of emotion was formed and how pre-war traditions of publicly speaking about emotions led to de-solidarization and ruining of social ties during the war, forming isolated, varied, and fluid affective ecologies online.