Politics, Rhetoric, and Emotions
The article “Sneaky Rhetorics, Habitual Media, and the Affective Politics of Lurking on Facebook,” had a unique take on stickiness in the media. Especially when the author addresses the emotional toll it has. The article itself goes over doomscrolling and FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) while also addressing the feelings that are produced. In the article, Maggie Fernades, Matthew Homer, and Jennifer Sano-Franchini conducted an experiment together that relates to emotions while on social media. A finding that intrigued me was when the author brought what the content that was shown to them through their algorithm caused feelings of stress and anxiety.
“As longtime Facebook users, all three of us perhaps unsurprisingly identified Facebook as a source of anxiety and stress, feelings that we recall really starting from the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” The article brought many points about the content that floods our feeds during certain times is a form or sneaky rhetoric (title reference)! People get videos that already amplify what the person is feeling based on current events. “What does this mean?” Well, it means that the stress and anxiety that was felt had to do with our feed always feeding us our worst fear imaginable!
Sneaky Rhetoric in the Big 2026
I mean it’s happening right now in our current social media climate, is it not? This information Fernades et al. Gathered was all just from Facebook. Imagine if they expanded their experiment to other social media outlets like Tik Tok or Instagram. Their findings wouldn’t even be close to what they found the first time. As someone who uses Tik Tok daily, I can say that every swipe is a glass waiting to drop. You never can truly stay in the carefree bubble, not when the world is as bad as it is. One scroll could be a goof video the next one being another death happening in the Gaza strip. It is a constant reminder of the pain that is happening in the world.
The reminder that there isn’t much you can do from your dorm room on Kean campus. All we are made to do is watch out the world go down a black whole of pain and suffering. That is where anxiety comes from. The depression of not knowing what you are going to school for can really make a difference in the future. The future that isn’t even set in stone for many of us because the government is sabotaging everything. The feelings that the people in this article had during the 2019 election? Yeah, that is us in 2026 with a world that sees other human beings and thinks of them as animals. Digital rhetoric doesn’t help this case at all, only making it works with its ways to make us feel all the negative emotions when ingesting our algorithm on social media.
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