Problematizing shame: Affective experimentation on social media

Abstract

This chapter presents an experimental research process that aims at 'repurposing' social media's potential for assembling social formations around specific issues. This was done by exploring the subject of shame and chronic illness through a research design that invited people with a chronic condition to share their everyday stories of shame on or via two social media profiles of a patient community called Chronic Influencers. The collected stories show that shame revolves around the experience of an affective failure in terms of both being too sensitive (e.g., being exhausted too quickly) and making too little impact on the world (e.g., having to decline 'normal' activities). Another central pattern is that shame is often linked to a feeling of having failed the expectations of children, partners and friends. This stresses that shame stories can also be approached as a repository of affirmative investments articulated through failure: investments in, for example, norms and ideals related to the body, motherhood, the household and citizenship. Furthermore, the material seems to underline how collective processes of sharing personal shame stories on social media can create awareness of the collective dimensions of shame and thus help alleviate the experience of shame as a strictly personal experience.