Abstract
Approximately 300 miles from my office, in Barron, Wisconsin, a real-life thriller has been unfolding over the past few months. In October 2018, sheriff’s deputies responded to a cryptic 911 call and found a door to a home kicked in, two parents shot dead, and their teenage daughter—Jayme Closs—missing. Twitter jumped swiftly into action, creating hashtags such as #findjayme for users to stay informed and show their support.
Exactly two months after Jayme went missing, the town of Barron erected a Christmas tree, which they called the Tree of Hope, and held a lighting ceremony. Among the attendees were Jayme’s family, friends, neighbors, classmates, and teachers. The schedule for the ceremony included contributions from a deacon, pastor, choir, and a former contestant on The Voice. News coverage of the event reached international audiences and showed hundreds in attendance, united to express their hope that Jayme would return safely (she did). In the days of social media, one has to ask: Why did people bother to physically show up to gather around a tree, when they could just #findjayme from their couches?
E. Doyle McCarthy reminds us in Emotional Lives: Dramas of Identity in an Age of Mass Media that people still desire to enter into public, physical spaces to share experiences with others. Yes, we bring our gadgets along to document moments and share them with those who could not make the trek. But we are there to feel the moments ourselves. We show up to feel the hope that Jayme returns home safely. We pay hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars to feel the excitement of watching our favorite band in concert. We travel across the country to war memorials to feel the grief over lives lost. We go to these places despite the abilities to stream live video of events and to scroll through the online photo album of someone else chronicling their own journey at the location.
McCarthy’s explanation for these phenomena starts with postmodern depictions of identity, which she reviews in Chapter Two. The chapter operates well as a stand-alone overview of these writings, while also specifying her unique take on how the postmodern era has shifted the ways individuals craft their selves. Like other postmodern theorists, McCarthy claims that individuals search for authenticity through their experiences. She distinguishes herself from others by linking the claim to the sociology of emotions. A marriage between identity and emotion seems obvious, especially when you peruse the headings of recent articles and chapters reviewing either topic. The gist of this prior work is that shared expectations within a culture inform how people occupying an identity should emote. McCarthy adds that this sets the stage for postmodern individuals to view seeking out emotional experiences as another extension of their search for an authentic self. She refers to this search as a practice of postmodern emotion culture.
In Chapter Three, McCarthy uses two physical structures that summon the masses to assemble together in order to describe postmodern emotion culture: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Oklahoma City National Memorial. Feeling grief over the loss of life is not new, but its public display through memorial is. These two memorials offer a means to experience being a part of a larger collective. Much like we are obsessed with revisiting older versions of ourselves (e.g., using #ThrowbackThursday to post a picture of ourselves from high school on social media), we yearn to revisit the collective past. Our pilgrimage, however, is not solely to give ourselves up to the collective, which contradicts common postmodern characterizations of individuals as “anti-institutional” (p. 19). These memorials inspire collective feelings of grief, yet also allow for more individualized experiences. McCarthy views the minimalist design of modern memorials, like these two, as key for encouraging visitors to project their own individualized emotional expressions. Accordingly, the experience allows for feeling both collective and individualized emotions.
At this point in the argument, McCarthy has a few different directions she could take because her claims thus far yield a contradiction: How can individuals simultaneously obsess over curating selfies before posting them on social media and yearn for being a part of a collective? An easy way to resolve the contradiction is to posit the two states as opposing forces. Indeed, in Chapter Three, McCarthy declares, “for us postmoderns, identification can be either ‘too much’ or ‘too little’ . . . we are desperate to relate, yet wary of the state of ‘being related’” (p. 84, emphasis in original). Hence, the two states may coexist because a person can either do one or the other, but not both, and moves between the two throughout their days.
Instead, McCarthy goes another direction in Chapter Three by claiming that the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. McCarthy views attending public events as an extension of our social media lives. Social media are popular because people feel a desire to enter into this form of the public sphere; that is, the selfies they post are for the public. Other technological changes over the past several decades—such as the proliferation of televisions into households and 24-hour news channels—have provoked a new kind of individual, one accustomed and even eager to enter into spaces to share experiences with complete strangers. The 24-hour news channel, for example, broadcasts events to a mass audience composed of individuals that would otherwise be strangers by virtue of being separated by time and space. Although the mass audience experiences an event at different times and locations, they have a common stimulus and therefore respond in similar ways. This produces mass emotions in response to distal events, like the collective feelings of hope for Jayme Closs’s safe return. Technological changes have facilitated the promotion of a collective identity, leading us to associate mediatized experiences with collectives. The desire to curate and post selfies, then, is the same one that wills individuals to enter into public memorials.
The final step needed to explain why people choose to physically visit public memorials and events such as Jayme’s Tree of hope over virtual attendance occurs in Chapter Four. McCarthy’s backdrop is familiar to readers of postmodern theory: globalization and the ubiquity of technology have granted individuals access to many others. The consequences are familiar to regular users of social media, which is that since we cannot cultivate strong ties with all of them, we are left with networks full of strangers and a sense of obligation to display emotions for and with them. We can expend minimal costs fulfilling the obligations because social media makes it easy to feign excitement over another’s newborn baby or job promotion. Such an environment creates what McCarthy describes as “an urge, indeed, a yearning, built into our mediated world and ourselves to get close to others and to things, to ‘eclipse’ the distances of hierarchy and difference” (p. 108). Physically showing up, then, reminds us what it was like to feel authentic excitement, thereby positioning physical public spaces as another means for postmodern individuals to find authenticity.
Altogether, McCarthy’s focus on emotions gives readers a more complete picture of postmodern individuals and how they act on and are acted on by technologies.