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Paper short abstract

Drawing on Digital Anthropolgy, this paper explores how Instagram engagement during 'viral temporalities' produces polarized, embodied digitalities. It introduces “distractociality” and “fuzzy-hazy imaginaries” to analyse affective intensity, dis/connection, and algorithmically shaped participation.

Paper long abstract

This conference paper explores how Instagram-mediated engagements during ‘viral temporalities’ produce polarized imaginaries, embodied emotionalities, and forms of dis/connection. Tracing the circulation of viral reels created by content creators, I track how personal interpretations of the object rendered viral become entangled with conspiratorial narratives, affective intensification, and moral positioning. These mediated framings actively shape competing worldviews of what the viral issue 'is meant to be' and generate fragmented imaginaries of a moment framed as collectively significant.

Drawing on digital anthropology, participant observation as an active Instagram user, and open discussions with Instagram users, this paper approaches these dynamics ethnographically through lived, felt, and embodied digital engagement. Scrolling, watching, reacting, and disengaging emerge as affective practices that produce emotional saturation, agitation, and dispersal. In addition to asking how polarised imaginaries emerge, this paper asks why Instagram repeatedly produces affective intensity without sustained relationality. Drawing on concepts such as "affective economies", "embodied digitality", the "ambivalence of the digital", and "algorithmic amplification and affordances", I argue that 'distractociality' arises at the intersection of platform-tempered attention, affective circulation, and embodied polarized participation.

I further introduce the concept of 'fuzzy-hazy imaginaries' to capture the blurred, unstable, and contested understandings that emerge at the intersection of viral content, conspiracy-inflected interpretations, and embodied affective engagements. This paper contributes to discussions of embodied digitalities, affective economies, and polarised imaginaries. It argues that digital infrastructures do not merely mediate collective moments. Nevertheless, they reconfigure how bodies feel, relate, and disconnect in situations otherwise imagined as sites of shared belonging.