Digital compassion: Moody citizenship and an ethics of care

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between mood, compassion and public values in a world suffused with digital media technologies. Its opening gambit is that mood should n’t be seen either as a reaction to the state of our public realm, nor as a private filter that shapes one’s personal experience of a pre-existing public world. Instead, mood is constitutive of publicness, including the values associated with it. This challenges the view that moods such as distractedness, listlessness and boredom prevent individuals from participating maximally as citizens, as well as the often-voiced contention that impatience, irritability and anxiety are warping public values. The article investigates moods, as distinct from emotions, as acquired clusters of practice that propel mobility through environments that are more often than not digitally mediated to some degree. Focussing on the temporality, habituation, and embodiment of moods in everyday (digital) experience, the case is made for an orientation to the world that amounts to a distinctive bearing towards others, one which is more ambivalent but also less demanding and less objectifying than the voracious gaze of the steely citizen more commonly associated with publicness and public values, such as justice and solidarity. This bearing-towards is digital compassion, whose embodied enactment instantiates an as-if-ness — that is, an as-if-it-matters that thereby substantiates these values on the go in the ever-unfolding present — that underpins performative legitimacy and authority in the form of collectively recognisable roles, institutions, processes and values. Digital compassion is both the felt experience and precondition of a phatic publicness, an opening towards the inchoate and multitudinous other through which public values are made flesh in mundane habituated practices of what-next-ness.