Drawing on our 3-year digital ethnography of cross-partisan debates in the context of the 2020 US election and January 6 Capitol insurrection, this essay examines the affective and discursive dimensions of online polarization, contributing new understandings of how genre functions as a system of norms that shapes emotional performance online. Through a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework, we demonstrate melodrama’s role as a fundamental storytelling structure responsible for the production of polarized cross-partisan debate on social media platforms. Our multi-method analysis of 5000 posts from Twitter, Facebook and Gab reveals users’ adherence to melodramatic group identities, enforced through emotional policing and mimetic identification with political influencers. Adopting roles of victim and villain, users channel emotions into archetypal and ritualized narratives of good and evil that in turn polarize political debate. Finally, this essay outlines our innovative methodology of “affective discourse analysis”, a multi-method approach to tracking and coding the social materiality of emotion through digital linguistic practices.

中文翻译：

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数字情感文化与情节剧的逻辑：通过类型和情感话语分析的视角，网络两极分化和 1 月 6 日国会大厦骚乱

本文借鉴我们对 2020 年美国大选和 1 月 6 日国会大厦叛乱背景下的跨党派辩论进行的为期 3 年的数字民族志研究，探讨了网络两极分化的情感和话语维度，为类型如何作为一个系统发挥作用提供了新的理解。塑造在线情绪表现的规范。通过跨学科的理论框架，我们展示了情节剧作为基本叙事结构的作用，负责在社交媒体平台上产生两极分化的跨党派辩论。我们对 Twitter、Facebook 和 Gab 的 5000 条帖子进行了多方法分析，揭示了用户对夸张的群体身份的坚持，这是通过情绪监管和对政治影响者的模仿认同来强制执行的。用户扮演受害者和恶棍的角色，将情感引导到关于善恶的原型和仪式化的叙述中，这反过来又使政治辩论两极分化。最后，本文概述了我们的“情感话语分析”创新方法，这是一种通过数字语言实践跟踪和编码情感的社会物质性的多方法方法。