AFFECTIVE TEMPORALITIES ON SOCIAL MEDIA: WORLD YOUTH DAY 2023

Abstract

Post-secular pilgrimage is increasingly popular, affording communitas (Maddrell & della Dora, 2013) as well as collective effervescence (Serazio, 2013) to pilgrims. Pilgrimage can be augmented by digital media (Maddrell & della Dora, 2013), but pilgrims usually limit their access to habitual devices, people, and digital services during their pilgrimage (Jorge, 2023). This paper focuses on the case of the World Youth Day 2023, hosted in Lisbon, and seeks to explore the role of digital and social media in sustaining pilgrim communities as atmospheres developed through time flows (Hitchen, 2021). To such end, we use the notion of affective temporalities (Nikunen, 2023). We performed a content, multimodal analysis (Bouvier & Rasmussen, 2022) on the material gathered through searching Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Giphy, and maps and apps related to the event. While Facebook groups allowed for coordination and peer support and advice, TikTok and Instagram afforded gains of visibility through hashtags. Giphy appears as a repository of humorous content from both official and vernacular cultures. As for apps and maps, they seemed to be more focused in the present, as they were helpful tools to navigate and manage the logistics of the event, but did not take on a collaborative mode. Anticipation, coordination and rememorating were shared affective temporalities shared by pilgrims through social media, through which communitas, effervescence and longing were processed.