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Reading, as a process of knowledge acquisition, is one of the most wonderful moments of human spiritual growth. Its importance to the construction of students' professional theories, the improvement of academic ability, and the creation of social responsibility is self-evident.
"Network Communication Studies" is one of the compulsory courses for the Master of Communication (Network Communication) of our school, which has always advocated interdisciplinary reading focusing on network communication and social development, and continuously promoted common academic growth through systematic and profound reading by teachers and students. Here, we study the scriptures together, collide ideas, and pursue the truth.
In the spring of 2024, 16 students will take the course. After discussion between teachers and students, students were divided into four thematic learning groups according to their reading interests: Network Communication and Technology, Network Communication and Politics, Network Communication and Culture, and Network Communication and Journalism. In terms of book selection, this semester adopts the method of teacher's recommendation + student's self-selected works for reading, and strives to achieve the harmony and unity of important literature + interest-oriented literature. The disciplines involved in the use of the works include journalism and communication, philosophy, linguistics, sociology, political science, law, economics, management and other disciplines.
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Ao Yu
Wuhan University
Master of Communication, Class of 2023
(Network Propagation Direction)
Research interests: intelligent communication, human-computer interaction, technology and emotion
Read a deep reading list
YI Yan. Research on affective factors in communication mechanism[M].Beijing:People's Daily Publishing House,2020.
Hector · MacDonald. Liu Qingshan, trans. Beijing: Democracy and Construction Press, 2019.
Note: The content quoted in this article is mainly from the above works. For ease of reading, no page numbers or other information is indicated.
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What does emotion mean for journalism? Previous research on journalism and emotion has been based on three theoretical premises: the first is to understand Internet journalism as a process of continuity rather than change, the second is to regard emotion as an individual, stable response rather than an immediacy and contextualized performance, and the third is to believe that emotional phenomena are replicable and observable. However, emotions are often highly contextualized on the surface, and emotional experiences are shaped in the process of interaction, which will eventually change the process of news production and consumption, resulting in a change rather than a continuation of news. It can be seen that no matter how rich the research at the micro level is, it cannot finally respond to the above questions.
Based on this, based on the two books "Research on Emotional Factors in Communication Mechanism" and "Post-Truth Era", this paper focuses on the emotional logic and specific mechanism behind news production, and tries to respond to the above problems from the level of internal logic, and "unmask" the emotional mechanism behind news. Further, is emotion a new theoretical opportunity or a myth for the perspective of journalism research? From these two books, this paper summarizes the historical context of sentiment research in journalism, the theoretical basis of emotion research, and the strategy of emotion production.
1. Historical Retrospection: The Conflict and Tension between Emotion and Reason
The first stage: Since the era of mass communication, traditional media such as radio and television have been adhering to the demand of rational communication when carrying out news reports.
The second stage: Since the 70s of the 20th century, great breakthroughs have been made in information technology, and new technologies such as computers and the Internet have been gradually applied to the field of news communication, which has accelerated the collapse of the boundary between professional and amateur and impacted the stability of the news field. The emergence of "public news" and "participatory news" has brought emotions back into the logical framework of news dissemination.
Stage 3: In the context of further changes in media technology, people are becoming more and more personally and emotionally engaged in the world around them. The form of media is mobile, and it has obvious personalized characteristics. In particular, the popularity and increased frequency of use of smartphones are quickly becoming the main platform and not just an option. News organizations have adopted a mobile-first strategy. Journalism emphasizes the connection between people.
The fourth stage: in the context of the era of deep media integration, emotional communication and rational communication have developed from complementary symbiosis to the stage of integration and coexistence. The binary distinction between "emotional" and "rational" forms of journalism has been gradually broken, and emotional communication is not the opposite of rational communication, but a communication paradigm that conforms to the communication laws of the era of convergent media.
Fig.1 Changes in emotion research in the journalism and communication industry (compiled by the author)
2. Theoretical basis: Emotions as a perspective in journalism research
(1) Cybernetic perspective
The study of emotions from a cybernetic perspective is divided into three categories: cultural control, social control, and identity control. Cultural control belongs to the constructivist perspective, which both emphasizes that cultural "social norms are the most important determinants of emotion, and acknowledges that cultural rules, although they restrict the formation of emotional experience and the expression of emotion, are not immutable." ”
1. Cultural control
This perspective is represented by Hochschild, A, R. and Shou S. Based on Goffman's mimetic theory, the former developed the "Emotional Theater Theory", which holds that under the influence of emotional culture and ideas, characters follow "feeling rules" and "display rules" in the process of interaction. The role here mainly refers to a person's social role. Short extended Mead's theory of symbolic interaction to the study of emotional themes, arguing that individuals construct their emotions within the boundaries set by social norms and intrinsic stimuli.
2. Social control
More attention is paid to the influence of social structure and social relations on emotion, and the view that cultural norms determine emotion is opposed. This perspective is represented by Collins, R's theory of the chain of interactive rituals, Kemper.T.D. and the status expectation theories of Ridgeway, C.L. and Berger, J. The theory of the interactive ritual chain reveals that individuals with power and status in the interaction tend to receive high emotional rewards. Kemple's "power-status" model attempts to show us that the maintenance or change of power and status evokes specific "structural emotions" in individuals. What status expectation theory wants to illustrate is the importance of status expectation to emotional mobilization and operation.
3. Agree to control
The representative is Styker, s., who first conceptualized the self as a multiple identity composition, and argued that the identity that occupies a prominent position in the hierarchy tends to guide the behavior of the character, and the emotion will motivate the individual to regulate his own behavior according to whether the character performance meets the criterion of identity setting.
(2) Exchange of perspectives
The study of emotion from the perspective of exchange is represented by the emotion theory of communicative networks.
The theory is based on the study of the relationship between common behavior, affective response, and group solidarity, where joint activity must satisfy two things, i.e., the non-separation of contributions and the sharing of responsibilities. In shared behavior, the more deeply the actor perceives the shared responsibility, the more likely he is to attribute the success or failure of the behavior to the network. Specifically, the attribution of positive emotions is conducive to increasing the stickiness of the actors to the network, and the attribution of negative emotions will promote the separation or alienation of emotions.
In addition, there are often two ways of network connection in common behavior, one is positive connection and the other is negative connection. In the network of negative connections, successful exchanges only help to strengthen the exchange relationship, not the emotional connection. Unsuccessful exchange relationships will hinder the creation of groups. Of course, there is also a third situation in the process of transforming the network into a group, that is, the actor causes negative emotions due to the loss of "identity", so that the phenomenon of detachment from the network and the inability to form a group occurs.
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(3) Comprehensive perspective
Different from the control and exchange perspectives, some researchers have proposed an "integrated perspective", among which Jonathan H. Turner is a representative that cannot be ignored. His contributions are manifested in two aspects: first, he tries to integrate and transcend the current sociological theories of various emotional perspectives to create a more explanatory sociological theory of emotion. Second, he is actively engaged in the introduction of biology into the sociological analysis of emotions, in an attempt to provide a scientific perspective on the many emotional characteristics of human beings from an evolutionary perspective. Regarding emotions from the perspective of transactions, Turner proposed that human beings will generate at least five kinds of transactional needs to generate the desired state of the interacting object, and among these five transactional needs, the more the desired state of self-realization needs and benefit needs is satisfied, the more likely the people in the interaction will experience positive emotions and self-attribution, and at the same time give positive emotional rewards to the group members in the above network states.
Table 1: Basic Classification of Sentiment Research Perspectives (Compiled by Authors)
3. Emotional Strategy: The Four Core Emotional Resources of Human Beings
In the context of the era of deep media integration, emotional communication and rational communication have developed from complementary symbiosis to the stage of integration and coexistence. In his specific journalistic practice, Wahl-Jorgensen has analyzed the emotional strategies in Pulitzer prize-winning journalism and proposed the "ritual of affective strategies". This "emotional strategy ritual" is not a call to action for journalists to express their own emotions. The expression of emotions is very tightly regulated.
Some scholars have further proposed the concept of "affective impartiality", and Krauss argues that "affective impartiality" is not unconditional. It requires two kinds of practice: the first must be based on the basic principles of the political order and public reason. The second is empathy, in which citizens put themselves in the shoes of different groups through the mechanism of "empathy", taking into account the legitimate feelings of all affected parties and absorbing them into a generalized standpoint. Yi Yan divides emotions into four basic categories, including compassion, love, sense of justice, and aesthetic emotions, as shown in Table 2. Xiao Jun found that countries with different cultural contexts used different emotional strategies to report on the same event when reporting on the Asian Games, such as Reuters and Xinhuanet.
Table 2: The Four Core Emotional Resources of Humans (Compiled by Authors)
IV. Conclusion: Emotional Turns and Myths in Journalism
In the field of humanities and social sciences, there is an "emotional turn", and the study of emotions has gradually accumulated the theoretical basis of philosophy, psychology and other disciplines, and the latest progress in the fields of sociology, brain science, and artificial intelligence. When Marx and Engels discussed the psychology of communication between various nationalities, they talked about the "emotional" factor many times, believing that it would play a moderating and even decisive role in the interaction between the two sides. For news production and dissemination, "emotion", as an implicit element, is obscured in the mechanism and logic of communication, and often falls into the debate of the binary opposition between "rationality" and "emotion". Through a detailed analysis of the perspective, classification of emotion, and emotion mechanism of emotion research, this paper attempts to make the emotional mechanism behind the news gradually "visible".
From the perspective of the relationship between news and emotion, in the new technological context such as platform society and digital age, these emotional strategies are changing in the process of news production and dissemination, which makes practical problems such as "emotional dislocation" arise in specific news practice, but it is still undeniable that emotion has become an indispensable element in news production and dissemination, and is becoming the "sixth value" of news production. The "black box" of emotional mechanism needs to be opened through more detailed research. Especially in the environment of social media, since its birth, social media has not served objective and neutral news and information production like traditional media, nor has it served as an intermediary between citizens and the state, but has come into the world as a new and convenient way to socialize. Numerous studies have shown that social media greatly promotes people's sense of emotional belonging, and it is emotion, rather than reason, that becomes the driving force for the digital public to connect with each other, which is precisely the opposite of the "rational public" called for by Habermas's concept of the public sphere.
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From the perspective of the research methods of news and emotion, the variability, inmeasurability, and limited analytical framework of emotion itself have cast a veil of mystery over our research on news and emotion. The bigger question behind this is how to ensure the validity and explanatory power of emotion research when we are faced with an accelerated and fluid society and media? This is a topic that deserves further discussion in future research.
Resources
1. Yi Yan. Research on affective factors in communication mechanism[M].Beijing:People's Daily Publishing House,2020.
2. [English] Hector · MacDonald. Liu Qingshan, trans. Beijing: Democracy and Construction Press, 2019.
3. Zhang Chun. From Rational Public to Emotional Public:Theoretical Transmutation of Public Sphere in Digital Age[J].Journal of Guangzhou University(Social Sciences),2024,23(02):35-44.)
4. Cai Wen, Wang Huiyi. Emotions in news communication:analysis and thinking[J].Young Journalists,2023(12):9-12.)
5. Chen Yang, Zhou Zijie. From the Masses to the "Emotional Masses": How the Transformation of Mainstream Media's Audience View Affects News Production--A Case Study of People's Daily WeChat Official Account[J].News and Writing,2022,457(07):88-97.)
6. Li Xiaopeng, Fan Jinghan. The "rational-emotional" integration paradigm of news communication under the deep integration of media[J].China Reporter,2023,(10):101-107.)