Digital communication transmits affect rather than feeling because affect lacks narrative

Evidence

Feeling can be recounted. It has narrative length, or breadth. Neither affect nor emotion admits an account. The crisis of feelings that can be observed in contemporary theatre also represents a crisis of giving-account (Erzählung). Today, the narrative theatre of feelings is yielding to a clamorous theatre of affects. Because narrative is lacking, an affective mass gets piled onto the stage. But, in contrast to feeling, affect does not open up space. Instead, it steers a linear path in order to discharge, to unload itself. The digital medium is an affect-medium too. Digital communication fosters the immediate release of affect: catharsis (Affektabfuhr). Simply on the basis of its temporality, digital communication conveys affect more than it transmits feeling. Shitstorms are streams of affect. They represent exemplary phenomena of digital communication. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 96

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s soundscape/silence notes on media temporality and to the general history-of-communication software on how media skew content form. — connects to: Email and postcards are contrasting material forms of correspondence with distinct affective weight — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 498
• STORYSTEM: A storyworld where people can only express via affect (shouts, releases) because narrative capacity has eroded — echoing Han’s claim that bit-sized catharsis replaces recounted feeling.