Abstract
There is strong evidence for sharing being influenced by people’s immediate feelings about an event or issue, their emotional investments in story sharing and their affective relations with their social networks. This chapter examines why the concept of affect is critical to understanding people’s decisions to share social media content, and why Facebook’s emotional contagion study represents less interesting avenues for investigating sharing behaviours than approaches attuned to culture and politics. It investigates the cultural context and emotional triggers for news sharing, the news values that made stories shareworthy and the feelings news evoked. It finds significant gender and age differences in the emotional states that prompt sharing behaviours, and clear affective trajectories in the types of stories shared and the intentions for exchanging them.
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Notes
- 1.
The team consisted of Adam Kramer, then head of Facebook’s Data Science section, and two academics from Cornell University, then graduate student, Jamie Guillory and Professor Jeffrey T. Hancock, now at Stanford.
- 2.
As our research partner Andrew Hunter argued at the start of this project, “Dogs rule. Stories about dogs are shared far more than stories about cats. Not only are dogs more shareable, they are more newsworthy. When we crunched the data from our first major data set in 2012, dogs featured in double the number of headlines as cats. Why dogs? They are interwoven so much tighter into the human story. In part because they are so much better at acting like humans. It turns out that animals acting like people equals sharing gold” (Walkley Foundation 2015).
- 3.
A subject of interest in television studies, particularly around audience reactions to telethons (see Tester 2001).
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Martin, F., Nightingale, V. (2019). Affect and the Motivation to Share News. In: Sharing News Online. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17906-9_7
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