AMBIENT AMPLIFICATION: ATTENTION HIJACKING AND SOCIAL MEDIA PROPAGANDA

Abstract

Over the last decade, the rise of memetic media in combination with multimodal platform environments have radically transformed our experience of digital culture. On TikTok, gestures and sounds go viral. Twitter (X) @tags operate as bonding tools and ignite ‘supercharged’ critical publics. Coordinated link-sharing and attention-hijacking drive cross-platform engagement. Narratives promoted by state institutions become part of the global digital culture war. Networked content made up of heterogeneous elements sparks new forms of presencing, propaganda, and play, producing conflict-ridden communities of practice. The amalgamation of this all into people’s everyday lives marks a qualitative shift in the ways we use social media. While there has always been an affective component to digital objects such as hashtags (Papacharissi 2015), contemporary audiovisual platforms increasingly target the full sensory experience of human bodies. The focus shifts from fleeting encounters with recommended content to ambient arrangements of linked sounds, networked text, clickable icons, and moving images (Han and Zappavigna 2024; Parry 2023). Within these structures, hybrid cultures of amplification emerge, relying on both intensification and extension. As expressive modalities evolve, amplification not only animates momentary affective impulses but also manifests through repeated attempts at attention hijacking that spread across platforms via everyday acts of sharing (John 2017; Citton 2017). In view of these transitions, internet scholars turn to the role of affect to describe the rhythms of online exchanges that are not reducible to singular constituents and can both diminish and increase the engaging potential of content- and data-informed connectivity (Hillis, Paasonen and Petit 2015; Boler and Davis 2020; Slaby 2019). Acts of participation that open up spaces of amplification escape any clear-cut demarcation. Platform communities assembled through different digital objects sidestep binary conceptions of authenticity and (coordinated) performance, allowing amplification to emerge from multiple discrepancies (Graham et al. 2021; DiResta 2021). Platform-mediated processes of authentication target misinformation campaigns, aiming to identify ‘trustworthy’ content (Burton, Chun et al. 2023). At the same time, seemingly straightforward contributions we like and share can be anything but (Phillips and Milner 2021). Understood as a web of affective stimulations (Siapera 2019), ambient amplification refers to social media encounters that bear potential for contestation in different registers of online performance, human and nonhuman. On the one hand, the proliferation of echo chambers and filter bubbles drawing together like-minded communities easily fits into the 'crowd modulation' project through the exhaustion of collective inclinations and correlated metadata (Rogers and Niederer 2020; Apprich et al. 2019). On the other hand, the layeredness of networked embodiment on audiovisual platforms rewires predefined trajectories of amplification through 'dissonant' connections that refuse to be contained in neat taxonomies. Although a great variety of scholarly work is dedicated to polarised engagement, there is still a large gap in studying how different modes of amplification are made to work in more ambiguous contexts (Paasonen 2023). The main challenge in approaching this research field is that the messiness of platform-mediated communication is difficult to comprehend. The shifts in relations of data-intensive participation and networked attention capture have made up the platforms' appeal since the very beginnings of the social web (Gillespie 2010), yet the actual ways these relations are made to work remain understudied. Moving away from the analysis of symptoms–as in the most visible content and events of peak intensity–this panel focuses on the ambient logic of amplification forged by the various attachments that online engagement in multimodal social media affords. Starting from the premise of plurality, it brings together five papers, each of which explores a different aspect of ambient amplification: Paper 1 explores the role of ‘thirst trap propaganda’ in military image wars on TikTok. Paper 2 reflects on the role of gestures in targeted war propaganda placements, presenting a visual method of slow circulation for amplified TikTok content. Paper 3 analyzes hashtagging- and @-tagging practices on X that undergird a polyvocal infrastructure exposing journalists to networked critique. Paper 4 looks into the spectrum of coordination in the service of attention hijacking, investigating what makes coordinated link-sharing on Facebook look ‘authentic enough’. Paper 5 interrogates the weaponization of narratives of a global culture war by Russian embassies, uncovering geopolitical strategies of amplification.