Digital atmospheres: affective practices of care in Elefriends

Mental distress, social media and affect

The experience of mental distress is increasingly shaped by social media (Aboujaoude and Starcevic 2015, Bauman and Rivers 2015). The proliferation of social media in the digital age has led to the development of a range of mental health-focused social media, designed as tools for support for people suffering ongoing mental distress (see Hamm et al. 2013 for a useful review). This article focuses on the use of one social media site as a digital space that facilitates peer support. We aim to explore the affective experience of using the site Elefriends and the dilemmas and challenges that are produced in the act of co-constituting distress (and responses to distress) via an online platform. The concept of digital atmosphere is developed to analyse the individual and collective forms of affective experience emerging in and through social media. This builds on the growing literature on atmospheres that has developed in affect studies (Anderson 2014, Brennan 2004). The use of the concept of atmosphere allows us to address experiences of distress through encounters between bodies and social media as technological objects, as well as digital spaces for interaction. Such encounters involve the transmission of affects that come to inform and produce individual feelings of distress.

Affect is frequently distinguished from emotion, with the latter considered as a personal, individual experience, and affect as the forces that usher in, produce and give rise to such experiences. Affects cannot necessarily be seen or known in advance, but they actualise in individual experience. This is why affects are commonly thought of as non-conscious and pre-personal, as they are antecedent to individual conscious experience (e.g. Brown and Stenner 2001, Clough 2007, Gregg and Seigworth 2010). This can help us think ‘beyond the body-as-organism’ (Blackman 2012: 5), as the powers of affect to influence and shape individual experience manifest as relations between bodies. This idea emanates from Spinoza, who defined affect as the ‘continuous variation’ that constitutes the ‘power of existing’ of bodies. It is variation because of the seemingly endless potential for new affective relations to form as bodies pass through the social worlds that constitute everyday life (e.g. Brown and Stenner 2009, Tucker 2010, Tucker and Smith 2014).

The increased digitisation in mental health means that social media are increasingly becoming the technologies that people connect with and through, and as such can be thought of has having powers to affect (Chun 2016). This troubles the traditional view that technologies are merely tools for human use. The affective relationships between technologies, bodies and affect have come under considerable scrutiny in accounts of digital or networked affect, often seeking to disabuse the notion that technologies are either passive tools for human use or agents in and of themselves (Ash 2015). Sophisticated accounts have emerged that describe the intricacies of the affective impact of technologies on human activity and how the latter can be enacted (although not determined) by the former (see Ash 2015 on ‘inorganically organised objects’ and tinnitus). Affect is conceptualised as a way of following the unfolding of life through milieus that are always-already embodied, technological and affective (see Hillis et al. 2015 for a useful summary).

Affective atmospheres

Atmospheres are imbued with the power to transmit affects, which can elicit bodily modifications (Brennan 2004: 1).

Atmospheres do not afford the same feelings for all, as individuals can experience the same atmosphere in different ways (Ahmed 2004). Think of the feeling of a room at the performance of a children's drama group. For the children performing, the room may induce feelings of anxiety and nervousness; for the parents watching, feelings of excitement and pride arise, while for the siblings of children performing, the room may induce feelings of jealousy and boredom. Atmospheres are emergent and non-determining. The notion of an affective atmosphere has become popular, included in a range of studies from surveillance (Ellis et al. 2013), public transport (Bissel 2010) and memory (Brown and Reavey 2015) to mental health recovery (Duff 2016).

Social media provide opportunities for people to ‘be together’, which, following Sloterdijk (2005), is a core characteristic of atmospheres (Anderson 2014).

We argue that multiple possibilities for the operation of collective affects emerge through social media, which exist as the ongoing collective encounters between bodies, even if bodies do not enter social media in a physical sense but most commonly through the media of discourse and images. Online communication should not be thought of as flattened affect, as it is no ‘less rich or intense’ (Paasonen 2015: 31) as in-person communication. The concept of atmosphere is valuable for understanding the implications of the increased social media use in mental health. Care for mental distress often occurs in individual relationships (e.g. between patient and doctor). Social media require a more collectivist experience where users have to acclimatise to being in an online environment populated by many. Undertaking care and support in this environment is very different from more traditional in-person settings. We argue that the concept of digital atmosphere helps us get analytically close to the experience of being an individual seeking care and support in an online collective environment, with considerable affective forces potentially at work.

Elefriends

This article draws on some empirical material from a broader project focusing on Elefriends (www.elefriends.org.uk). Elefriends was launched in 2013 by the UK mental health charity Mind. It is an online community that facilitates peer support for people experiencing mental health problems, and is one of the most prominent mental health-related social media sites in the UK. The site is organised via the ‘Ele’ (short for elephant), and there are approximately 50,000 registered users (as at July 2016). Communication is managed through a personal profile, which is customisable with a photograph and biography. Figure 1 shows the login page to Elefriends. Users can ‘post’ to the ‘activity feed’ (a feature which is similar to the ‘wall’ on other social network sites), which carries the option to respond either with a written response or by clicking on a number of buttons that display an icon illustrating ‘I'm thinking of you’, ‘I like this’ or ‘I hear you’. Users can also send private messages to each other. As communication focuses predominantly on distress, forms of support that emerge are different from those in other social media (e.g. Facebook). Typical conversations in Elefriends might involve speaking about a recent experience of medical intervention, a difficult period of distress or more general conversations about a range of mental health issues. Elefriends is moderated by a dedicated team of staff (although not overnight). Elefriends, and similar sites, are indicative of the way that mental health services are becoming less tied to institutional settings (McGrath and Reavey 2015).

Communication on Elefriends is largely constituted through discourse, and yet is indelibly connected to the ongoing embodied concerns of living with mental distress (e.g. medication) (Tucker and Goodings 2016). While most online communication is conducted through discourse, to reduce the experience of social media activity solely to the level of discourse is to miss additional affective layers that act as heterogeneous elements of digital atmospheres. The concept of atmospheres directs us to think of affect as materially bound up in the experience of using social media. In this article we focus on the discourse of online communication, but do so through a theoretical lens that incorporates the fact that it is ‘bodies experiencing distress’ that are using and experiencing social media. And while social media do not physically bring bodies together in a particular place, the experience of using such technologies is one of feeling connected to others. The feelings made possible by social media are shaped by the atmospheres that emerge through assemblages of bodies, social media and discourse.

Analytical approach

The data analysed below come from a larger project that collected data from 157 profiles (posts and comments) in Elefriends over a 1-month period (March 2014), and from interviews with users of the site. Participants were recruited via a post on Elefriends that could be clicked through to access details of the study (including participants’ information and their informed consent). The project received ethical approval from the University of East London's Research Ethics Committee. The user base of Elefriends is predominantly female (around 70%), and located in the UK (with a noticeable proportion from the south-east region). Online posts were analysed directly, while the interviews needed to be recorded and then transcribed. Standard ethical procedures for qualitative research were put in place to ensure the protection of the participants (e.g. all participant information was anonymised). Registration is required for the site so the data are not publicly available.

The data were categorised according to the following research questions: (i) how are ongoing experiences of distress shaped by Elefriends?; (ii) what is the role of affect in online care and support practices? and (iii) what new practices of care and support emerge through digital atmospheres? The data were coded in relation to these questions prior to a process of theme development. This involved repeated checking of emergent themes in relation to existing codes, and changing them where necessary prior to a set of final themes being configured. Here principles of thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006) were drawn upon. Some key theoretical points guided the analytic process throughout. These were: (i) distress is manifest in social-material environments that constitute everyday life (Brown and Reavey 2015, Brown and Tucker 2010, Goodings and Tucker 2015); (i) social media are objects that facilitate new encounters, both with other people and technology itself (Hayles 2012, Tucker and Goodings 2014); and (iii) atmosphere is a useful concept for illuminating co-producing practices of distress between bodies and technologies (i.e. Elefriends) (Hansen 2006, Tucker 2013). As such, analysis focused on distress as unfolding through socio-material practices that were always-already embodied, technological and affective. The analysis below does not represent an analysis of the dataset in entirety (due to space constraints) but rather presents prominent examples from key themes, which are indicative of broader issues in the data.

Entering digital atmospheres

The following section focuses on the ways that distress is grounded in participants’ experiences of using Elefriends for care and support. This facilitated an understanding of the ways that users were exposed to support online, and the conditions of that transition. This approach enabled us to focus on times when the reality of experiencing one's distress through Elefriends was particularly marked. Times of entry are points at which people have to adjust to a new form of care by connecting with other people, who, at least initially, are strangers. Developing new networks of support is the purpose of Elefriends, and analysing a user's narrative of entering the site allows us to identify some of the issues associated with this process. In the second half of the analysis we focus on the impact of people moving away from the site. The impact on existing support networks of users leaving unexpectedly is seen to focus on specific issues of risk that manifest as a potential spread of collective anxiety.

Amy's post is a reflection on her first year of using Elefriends and highlights a process of acclimatisation to the digital atmosphere of the site. Firstly, this involved trying to manage existing distress brought about by a lack of offline support at the time (‘I was searching and searching for some kind of support to get me through’). Secondly, it involved dealing with the affective implications of entering the site. As Teresa Brennan notes, ‘the “atmosphere” or the environment literally gets into the individual’ (2004: 1). Amy notes she was unsure how to ‘act’ at first, as it was a new atmosphere that she had not felt before. This is the key challenge for Amy for trying to work out how to use Elefriends for support. She entered a virtual space, which required some kind of performance for others, which was very different from her existing experience of seeking help in traditional offline spaces (e.g. with her therapist or doctor). Amy's task was made more difficult by the fact that she could not see the other people on the site, and so could not rely on visual non-discursive social cues to ascertain how the atmosphere operates. These concerns manifest as a delay in seeking help as she acclimatised to the atmosphere of Elefriends. Amy was worried that what she wrote would become a permanent part of her identity on the site (‘I worried so much about posting the “wrong” thing and it coming back to haunt me later on’).

The instantaneousness of social media can lead to the idea that connecting with people is relatively straightforward and yet, in terms of peer support and Elefriends, Julie's extract demonstrates how complex an experience it can be. As we saw with Amy, acclimatisation takes time, as identifying how the digital atmosphere of Elefriends operates is not immediate. Indeed, the atmosphere is subject to variation, and as such Julie has to come to terms with communicating in a changing digital space. Julie's initial search for support following her son's death through suicide involved looking for answers that she came to realise she could never find. Instead, she came to recognise her own feelings of distress only once she had been exposed to other people's stories in relation to suicide. This was a new affect of the atmosphere for Julie, and highlights how affect can be transmitted through atmospheres. It was not a general feature of the atmosphere in and of itself, but it becomes experienceable in the relational operation of communication through Elefriends between Julie and other users. It was also not immediately available to consciousness, and not something Julie felt she could provide to support others when she first started to use Elefriends. Although the possibility for her to do so exists as soon as her use of Elefriends commenced (as her bereavement preceded her use of the site), it took time for this to become a conscious option for her. It is virtual as it is a possibility, but not one that is actualised immediately. Indeed, Julie's path could have taken a different route (e.g. she could have stopped using Elefriends) and then the possibility would have never been realised. In this way, atmospheres can be thought of as having virtual and actual realms (Anderson 2014). The latter are the ones that come to be experienced, and the former are the multiple possibilities that exist, not all of which will be actualised.

The transmission of affect for Julie occurs when she posts about her experiences of her son's suicide. She refers to this as a ‘shared experience’. The idea of peer support is central to Elefriends, and Julie's extract demonstrates how this can work in action. The transmission of feelings of distress to Julie does not happen by directly being able to see it or hear it in others, as has been claimed in relation to affective contagion in groups (Sampson 2012). It is not something that passes through, or fills a space, as might happen in offline settings. Instead, it is through asynchronous and synchronous communication that affect is transmitted between users of the site. This is something quite distinct about the digital atmosphere of Elefriends. In-person atmospheres are often formed by the movement of affect through a collective of actors who are present (e.g. a crowd at a sports event). In Elefriends actors (i.e. users) are not always present, although traces of their activity are (e.g. previous posts and comments). Acclimatising to atmosphere consequently involves getting used to the absent-present form that others’ activity can take.

Julie's extract is an example of an atmosphere subject to continuous variation. It is the movement of affect that forms the atmosphere, and as the movement varies, so does the atmosphere. The unanticipated realisation that she could provide support to others unfolds through the movement of affect and the (re)shaping of the atmosphere. Julie was initially reluctant to accept the possibility that she could provide help to others but had to react to the new possibilities that emerged (e.g. being asked for support). Indeed, the idea of reciprocating support was initially troubling for Julie as it meant acting as if she could help, which to her was a presumption not easily made. The affective potential of the atmosphere shifts from initially affording Julie some means to cope with her loss (or at least provides some content to her unrelenting ‘search for answers’ to her son's suicide), to the point where the communication of her experience comes to afford support for others.

The following section explores in more detail how support for others can operate, and how the atmosphere can then produce new possibilities for the spread of affect. We use the term ‘fragile atmosphere’ to show how caring relations developed in and through Elefriends can come to need to be cared for themselves. It is not simply the case that joining Elefriends provides ongoing access to atmospheres of support, but that atmospheres themselves can become objects for care.

Fragile atmosphere

This extract demonstrates how a new form of care is required following the disruption caused by a user deleting their account. Here care shifts from focusing on an individual to the collective, as members of the community concerned about Lesley's deleted account attempt to manage the spread of anxiety through the group. The difficulty users have is ascertaining whether the deletion is an instance of a common social media practice (i.e. taking a break) or a sign of a more serious escalation of Lesley's distress (e.g. self harm, or even suicide). Laura's post transmits an anxiety through the network, which is picked up by other members who know Lesley. An atmosphere of concern and anxiety is created. This elicits a range of responses, which try, to varying degree, to repair the atmosphere. This is no straightforward task though. Angela offers a minimal response in the form of a ‘sad face’ emoji. Victoria extends this to include a brief comment (‘oh no’). These are common forms of social media communication, but run the risk of being seen as inadequate at a time when concern exists over Lesley's wellbeing. A further comment by Laura offers a possible explanation in terms of reminding others of Lesley's previous discussions of leaving Elefriends, although as these were never acted out, the current situation elicits a deeper concern.

The threat in terms of a growing atmosphere of collective anxiety is sufficient to warrant an intervention from one of the moderators of the site (who takes the form of the Ele) to try to repair the atmosphere. Quick action by the Ele is required to try to limit the development of a new atmosphere characterised by the spread of anxiety. The intervention is constrained though by the fact that Elefriends is a peer support site, and thus, no formal professional support can be provided. As such, the moderator cannot offer to help with the anxiety in a formal way, but can only offer a generic reason why a user may delete their account. The offer to provide any support beyond this is limited to questions about a user's account. While this may seem somewhat cold, it appears to be the key to ensuring that moderation does not overstep the clear boundary between overseeing online peer support and providing formal mental healthcare. The provision of care and support is structured to take place between users, rather than between individual and the professional service (in this case, Mind). This is one of the key challenges facing online peer support sites such as Elefriends. While peer support can have positive effects in terms of connecting people with similar experiences, when something goes wrong this can add to the distress of others, and cannot be addressed through the intervention of a professional. Peer support remains peer support, through thick and thin.

The conversation about Lesley shows how digital atmospheres vary through shifting patterns of affective energy, which inform users’ experiences of mental distress. The potential to provoke anxiety that spreads through the site can create challenges about how to communicate and interact without triggering distress in others. In pro-ANA online communities such concerns have been managed by developing group rituals that authenticate users as well as developing specific tools to make one's anorexic body ‘evident online’ (Boero and Pascoe 2012: 27). For users of Elefriends the concern is to make one's distress present online in such a way that facilitates care and support (for oneself and others), but without making it so evident that it triggers distress in other members of the community (e.g. through descriptions of self-harm). This tension is an ongoing feature of the atmosphere of the site.

Concluding remarks

The power of social media to connect people is well known. What this article has sought to highlight is what can happen when such power is put to work in mental health. We have argued that using the concept of atmosphere highlights the conditions, challenges and risks associated with entering, adjusting to and developing practices of care and support in and through Elefriends. This is important as not only is social media use in mental health increasing, it is happening simultaneously with a reduction in the availability of face-to-face services. This presents a cultural shift in mental healthcare. Peer support can empower people by offering access to a range of shared experience. And yet it also holds potentially negative implications of shifting responsibility for care to patients and service users, rather than professional services.

The analysis of the experiences of using Elefriends is of value in informing these issues. The concept of a digital atmosphere shows how people's distress is not solely dependent on individuals, but unfolds through collective practices that flow through bodies and social media. Instead of conceptualising individuals and Elefriends as distinct spaces, we have argued that users’ experiences of distress are shaped by being enveloped within atmospheres that involve bodies, discourse and images. Atmospheres transmit affects, which produce and inform individual experience, which in turn can change the atmosphere. The idea that Elefriends is a simply a tool for expressing distress is shown to be too simplistic, as it does not draw attention to the multiple ways that experiences of distress are shaped by being enveloped within digital atmospheres. Some of this is about social media being a technology (e.g. something instantaneous and always available) and some is about the reality of having the potential to connect with a huge number of people with shared experiences.

Providing support through social media is not without its problems. Unlike face-to-face spaces of support (e.g. community day centres), the availability of Elefriends means that there is considerable diversity in the levels and stages of distress for those who use it. The first challenge is being able to provide an online environment that can respond to a broad range of needs, e.g. from help at times of crisis (e.g. active self harm or suicide) through to information guidance (e.g. how to access financial support). Secondly, the caring nature of the activities in Elefriends means that users are automatically faced with a dilemma when friends from the site delete their profile unexpectedly. For others, this practice of switching off acts as a warning sign, and can create a collective anxiety in the community over the health of the user who has deleted. When this is coupled with distressing posts from the user prior to deletion the collective anxiety is amplified. Clearly, the care practices can become fragile at times of disconnection, which presents a possible limit to peer support in Elefriends (at which point the Ele commonly steps in to reassure them). Schillmeier (2014) describes how technologies are not just designed to fix the needs of care but they are an ‘active part’ in the configuration of caring relations. It is essential to care for these relations so as to enhance their affective capabilities (e.g. how to empower people through online peer support). Schillmeier continues that technology also ‘complicates’ the everyday practices of care and thus ‘caring relations require taking care of the on-going (affective) relations they create’ (p. 123). Analysing experiences of distress through Elefriends as atmospheric can help address these issues.

Thinking of Elefriends as multiple digital atmospheres speaks directly to the ways that mental distress is shaped by encounters with Elefriends as an object-technology itself, as well as a mediating space for encountering other people. Moreover, atmospheres, when thought of not as a thing, but rather as a ‘condition being constantly taken up in experience’ (Anderson 2014: 148), help to illuminate the ways that bodies shift through online care practices that are constantly being (re)created. This concept of digital atmosphere extends existing theories of digital affect though a focus on the transmission of affect through digital spaces and the subsequent production of individual and collective experience. Moreover, atmospheres speak directly to the ways that people's experience of using Elefriends is spatial, in the sense that they feel they are entering an environment populated by others and in which their activity is visible.

Elefriends is a networked technology facilitating multiple atmospheres that shape affect, and consequently users’ experiences of distress. These are characterised by new encounters and continual movement and actively caring for future affective possibilities is part of the everyday activity in Elefriends. Thus, time spent away from Elefriends can actually increase anxiety in the community. There may also be a number of practicalities and requirements that are necessary to constitute and continue practices of care and support on the site. Social media such as Elefriends should not be seen only as a solution to a problem (e.g. providing more effective peer support), but also need to be thought of as introducing new care practices, which themselves will require caring for. Social media can have positive benefits in relation to feeling support, but can actually exacerbate distress at other times. As we have shown, distress is changed by the experiences of using sites such as Elefriends, and thus, social scientific analysis needs to become attuned to the new affective possibilities of the increased use of technologies designed to assist with mental healthcare and support.