The Summer of 2020: Situating Digital Media in Scaling Affective Contagion: A Case of the George Floyd Video
Authors:   , Patel Shama 
Published: October 2023

In the summer of 2020, George Floyd an African American man was murdered when a white police officer pinned him to the ground for over 9 minutes in Minneapolis (USA). Captured on live video by a bystander and posted on Facebook, the brutality of the scene spurred street protests that rapidly spread around the world. The video fostered deeply affective reactions that were experienced as visceral bodily responses and feelings of pain, disgust, rage, and anger, motivating millions to take to the streets demanding change. Digital media amplified these affects through discursive and non-discursive means, extending their reach as an affective contagion. Since the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi provoked a deeply affective reaction that triggered the Arab Spring in 2010, video has become an essential form of media witnessing that has transformed how people activate and organize during these explosive moments of protest. While we appreciate the role of digital media in enabling practices that make communications faster and collectives more connected, understanding how digital media scales an affective contagion that circumscribes the globe remains unexplored. In studying the case of the George Floyd big bang moment and building-upon concepts developed by Deleuze and Guattari, this paper-based dissertation reveals that affective contagion scales in three phases. Explicated as - affectivity, mutativity, and mobility – each phase represents a step change in scaling that is initiated by the affective response to digital media that sets in motion minuscule material-affective flows expressed in daily encounters, which mutate and multiply through a proliferation of memetic mutations, enactments, and collisions and are mobilized by activist organizations in local-to-local contexts. In unfolding the scaling of affective contagion through the three phases of affectivity, mutativity, and mobility, the dissertation attends to the fluxes and flows in the milieu, and in mapping the paths of material-affective flows along which encounters continually come into being, the dissertation shows that the scaling of affective contagion occurs not as a point-to-point network of connections, or hierarchy of scales, or in the logics of operational processes and habitual practices, but as a meshwork of affective flows of growth and movement. Developed through five papers that cumulatively build scholarship, this dissertation’s main contribution is to situate digital media as agentic in conjuring viral worlds that scale an affective contagion. A second contribution is in articulating - affectivity, mutativity, and mobility – as three phases in the scaling of affective contagion and presenting a theoretical framework that can help scholars assess why certain digital media are highly affective while others fail to elicit a response. A third contribution is in presenting material-affective assemblage thinking as a theoretical lens and digital epidemiography as a research method in the qualitative study of highly affective phenomena at scale.