The Urgency and Affects of Media Studies

First, an understatement: the past two years have been emotionally challenging for members of academic communities in the humanities. According to the social media pages of many of my peers within the academy, 2016 and 2017 were full of stressors. Between the United Kingdom's "Brexit" referendum to leave the European Union, the election of reality television personality Donald Trump to the American presidency, and a number of terrorist attacks from Brussels to Orlando, many from around the world took to Facebook pages and Twitter feeds to vent, rant, mourn, express shock and denial, appropriately call out oppression in multiple forms, speculate on the motivations of white, working-class people, and threaten to move abroad. A common rhetorical strategy was to blame the media for sensationalizing bigotry and for placing ratings above the public interest. Expert lexicographers at Merriam-Webster proclaimed "surreal" ("marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream") as the dictionary's 2016 word of the year.¹ The brazen cultivation of an environment in which democratic publics could not cleanly distinguish truth from fiction helped create what Lynne Joyrich has called the "reality televisualization of political formations . . . a meshing of modes of thinking and modes of feeling, which has become the 'medium' in which our politics now exist."² Even media studies scholars who are trained to pause and think critically about patterns across global media flows, it would appear, can succumb to the affects of dread and despair that spread rampantly across networked publics, accelerated by the crisis-like temporality indicative of these media technologies.

As scholars of modern media cultures, we sit in a surreal position in the current changing political and technological landscape. From my own position at an American public university (and one of the largest Hispanic-student-serving institutions in the United States), Trump's election after a toxic campaign marked by sexism and white nationalism (followed by a presidency of far-right policy proclamations introduced through executive orders, juxtaposed to intelligence revelations surrounding Russian meddling in the election and influence in the cabinet) has comprised the core of these emotional orbits. Despite my relatively young professional career, the day after the 2016 American election was the toughest day of class I have taught, a sentiment shared by many colleagues regardless of rank or experience. On my own campus, students shared their fears about being deported or having family members deported. One female student broke down in tears, questioning her self-worth and ability to succeed professionally and personally. The affective demands of teaching are heightened through the neoliberal university, in which faculty are expected to manage our students' emotions while attempting to extract some critical thinking. In Baudrillardian fashion, we all appear to be living in a geopolitical melodrama, although, unlike Douglas Sirk's films of the 1950s or the prime-time soaps of the 1980s, this story is less glamorous and more disruptive, altering disciplinary and theoretical priorities.

Two media forms emblematic of the contemporary mediaspace come to mind: reality television and social media (namely Twitter). Both of these forms have been blamed for creating the conditions for Trump: their bandwidth as "free" media that engage the "ordinary" subject, their circulation within existing journalistic coverage (tweets and reality TV events becoming news stories), and their cultures of humiliation and competition, despite both having been conceived with democratic aspirations. But what good does it do to acknowledge how reality television acclimates its viewers to neoliberal culture (as many scholars have done), for example, when it has already cannibalized our liberal democratic political discourse?³ How can we, as scholars of media, break the patterns of consumption that fit into this cannibalization, when both the rhythms of dread and despair as well as the technologies of escapism appear to be too concretized into our social habits?

While any attempt to respond to such questions requires at least a moderate amount of arrogance, my own interests in this short article focus on questions of urgency and the affective residues of the current political climate as they relate primarily to television studies, my own area of research. I turn to...