Emotion and moral order in the reception of viral fabrications

CARRANZA, ISOLDA E.

Sevilla

Congreso; 11th International Symposium on Intercultural Cognitive & Social Pragmatics; 2024

Universidad Pablo de Olavide

The management of truth claims has been a classical topic in pragmatics and its relevance has been spurred by issues emerging in the so-called post-truth era and the availability of digital data. However, closed and relatively stable digital communities offer new insights into the affective and moral dimensions of the actual reception of dubious information. The present study draws from a combination of a general framework on metapragmatic awareness (Verschueren 2021), fruitful theorizations about communication on social media (Blommaert 2019), and developments in the sociopragmatics of emotion (Haugh & Alba Juez 2024). The corpus comes from a politically motivated WhatsApp community of around sixty researchers working in biology or related sciences which I was invited to join because of political affinity. The two-year digital ethnography involved intense observation as a ratified member under my full name. Given that a reported fact tends to be accepted as known if it is learned through a moral social actor, responses to posts within a closed digital community pose an empirical problem: the participants’ evaluations are shown to also have an emotional basis. The development of the group’s interaction history results in a shared, normative affective stance on certain issues. In that light, acceptability rather than truthfulness seems to be the participants’ concern.To account for the data, it is necessary to conceive of a ‘moral nexus’, i.e., a salient cross-play of informational content, emotional load, and the moral side of action. The acceptability of the former seems to be related to assumptions about the community’s shared emotional attunement and the information relayer’s moral standing. It is concluded that understanding the reception of potential untruthfulness in digital groupings which are communities stricto sensu calls for analysis at the level of collectivity as well as consideration of normative expectations and historical contextual conditions.