Affective Online Media Rituals: Toward a Theory of Algorithmically Amplified Ritual Communication

Abstract

The essay develops a theoretical framework that conceptualizes affective online media rituals as repetitive, platform-mediated communication practices through which collective emotional synchronization, community formation, and social meaning-making occur. The paper employs theoretical triangulation, drawing on three complementary theoretical traditions—ritual communication theory (Carey; Dayan and Katz; Couldry), affect theory and affective publics (Papacharissi), and platformization and deep mediatization theories (Gillespie; Hepp; van Dijck)—to provide a conceptual definition of affective online media rituals and develop a theoretically informed typology of their main forms and functions. The article further argues that contemporary media rituals are different from past broadcast rituals in that they are embedded in algorithmically curated platform environments. To explain this transformation, it introduces the concept of the algorithmic feedback loop, describing how emotional expressions are continuously transformed into data, amplified by recommendation algorithms, and recirculated as increasingly visible ritual performances. This mechanism transforms the production of collective emotional experiences in platform societies. The study also argues that the mechanisms presented are platform-specific; algorithmic amplification is a non-deterministic component of the system and does not necessarily result in enduring engagement or heightened political efficacy in a universal sense. The article contributes to media and communication theory in three ways: first, by introducing the concept of affective online media rituals; second, by proposing a theoretical model of algorithmically amplified ritual communication; and third, by developing a typology that provides an analytical framework for future empirical research on digital publics, platform communication, online participation, and emotionally driven collective action.

1. Introduction

The ritual theory of communication is not only significant in the research of interpersonal communication but is also indispensable in media research. After all, many dimensions of media use can be described and analyzed with the ritual model; all those situations where we encounter not only individual media content consumption but also community integration practices can be observed. News consumption, series watching, and shared media experiences from social media also serve to maintain social cohesion, both inside and outside echo chambers. In online manifestations, a shared experience is often experienced through media rituals, be it an everyday, cultural, political or even economic experience. The simultaneous experience of the ritual in the community also brings with it the fact that it connects the individual to the shared experience and to the public, emotional celebration of the group’s fundamental beliefs and ethical norms. The (media) ritual creates and controls experience through the constantly reorganizing act of creating the world (Pauly, 2014, p. 174). The study does not limit the concept of media rituals to the circle of mediatized rituals. In other words, it considers media rituals to encompass not only content through which offline ceremonial events are shared and transmitted on social media platforms but also all media content that facilitates the cognitive and emotional integration of the recipients through ritual practices. This includes hybrid rituals, in which the participants of the offline ritual event also share the event on their own social media platforms. This creates a kind of extension of the experience, and this digital experience extension provides an opportunity for those who are not physically present at the offline event to join the ritual event. At the time of writing, a particularly vivid example of this is the support for the Norwegian team at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with videos shared on social media in which participants imitate the movements of Viking rowers while shouting “Rú.” In addition to on-site reports (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO6hSz7VBVc; accessed date: 20 June 2026), the fan videos also included the ritual taking place in the Norwegian parliament (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEr7pQi9fR8; accessed date: 20 June 2026).

The aim of the study is to develop a theoretical framework for affective online media rituals, to conceptually define the phenomenon, and to create a theoretically grounded typology. The paper is essayistic in nature, i.e., it does not present the results of empirical research but rather seeks to develop a new concept and theoretical approach. The argument employs a form of theoretical triangulation, i.e., it is built on three interconnected theoretical pillars. The first is the ritual approach to communication and media, with particular attention to the works of Carey, Dayan and Katz, and Couldry, which interpret media as a ritual practice that creates social meaning and creates community. The second pillar is formed by the affective turn, which examines the relationship between emotions and media, and the theory of affective publics, drawing primarily on the work of Papacharissi. The third theoretical strand is the research on platformization, datafication, and deep mediatization, with a particular focus on the approaches of Gillespie, Hepp, and van Dijck, which shed light on the operational logic of digital platforms and the technological embeddedness of emotional interactions. By linking these three theoretical perspectives, the study creates a conceptual definition of affective online media rituals, explores their specific characteristics, and proposes a typology that may contribute to a deeper understanding of the ritual dimensions of platformized, emotion-driven communication. In this study, I first outline the roots of ritual theory and its development in media research. Then, following the research typology of network communication, social media and emotions, I address the development of media representation of emotions on online platforms, and then I discuss affective publics and their connection to the ritual functioning of media. Finally, I examine the role of platforms in the datafication and spiral amplification of emotions within the framework of the ritual model. Based on this, I present the functions of affective media rituals and the typology that can be built on them.

Although this article is theoretical in nature and does not report original empirical research, it draws on the results of previous empirical studies. These studies are not treated as representative evidence for the proposed framework, nor are they used to substantiate causal or generalizable claims. Their function in the study is to identify recurring empirical phenomena that are not emphasized by theoretical approaches to media rituals, affect, and platformization when examined separately. The empirical studies included in the discussion were therefore selected purposively, rather than representatively. The purpose of referring to these studies is therefore not to inductively infer the proposed theoretical framework from a limited empirical sample but to use empirically documented cases as points of theoretical articulation. The relationship between empirical and theoretical sources is complementary. Theoretical works provide the conceptual vocabulary and analytical level of the argument, while empirical studies offer concrete examples through which the conceptual problem becomes visible. Empirical results do not justify the proposed concept but rather demonstrate the relevance of the phenomena that the concept seeks to encompass. The article addresses three analytical levels. At the most abstract level, it draws on theories of ritual, affect, mediatization, and platformization to define the conceptual vocabulary of the argument. At an intermediate level, concepts such as affective publics and social media rituals form analytical bridges between these broader theoretical traditions and contemporary forms of networked communication. At the empirical level, previous studies of digitally mediated mourning, political participation, memorial practices, and other affectively charged forms of online interaction are used as concrete manifestations of the phenomena under study. These levels should not be interpreted as equivalent forms of evidence. Rather, they serve different epistemological functions within the argument. Theoretical sources define concepts and relations; meso-level concepts identify analytically relevant forms of mediated practice; and empirical studies demonstrate how particular configurations of these practices have been observed in specific contexts.

The conceptual construction proceeded through an iterative analytical comparison of the three theoretical traditions rather than through a linear derivation from any single framework. First, ritual communication theory was used to identify the core characteristics of ritualized communication, particularly patterned repetition, collective orientation, synchronization, symbolic meaning, and the reproduction of social bonds and boundaries. Second, affect theory and the concept of affective publics were used to specify the emotional dimension of these practices, focusing on affective intensity, circulation, alignment, and the formation of shared emotional orientations. Third, theories of platformization and deep mediatization were introduced to identify the technological and infrastructural conditions under which such practices acquire visibility, circulate, and are potentially amplified. The intersection of these dimensions generated the eight functions by asking what affective online media rituals accomplish when ritual form, affective dynamics, and platform-mediated conditions are considered together: affective alignment, community formation, legitimation and normalization, political mobilization, visibility production, moral framing and evaluation, memory and digital commemoration, and relational maintenance. The four ideal types were then constructed at a higher level of abstraction by grouping recurring combinations of these functions according to their dominant temporal orientation, social function, and mode and scope of participation. Thus, the functions represent analytically distinguishable processes, whereas the ideal types represent recurrent configurations in which several functions become dominant. This construction is heuristic rather than deductive or empirically exhaustive, and the resulting categories are intended as sensitizing concepts for subsequent empirical research rather than as predetermined empirical classifications.

The theoretical contribution of this article lies in its stronger connection with the dimensions that have previously been explored in the ritual organization of media practices, the affective dynamics of networked participation, and the infrastructural and algorithmic conditions of platformized communication. The proposed common analytical framework encompasses these perspectives and specifies how their interaction can be conceptualized in the context of platformization. The originality of the concept, then, does not lie in the fact that affect, ritual, or platformization have previously been ignored in isolation. Rather, it lies in its articulation of their intersection, where affective intensity is ritualized through recurrent mediated participation, while platform infrastructures increasingly participate in the circulation, visibility, and amplification of these ritualized practices. The contribution of this article is primarily conceptual and integrative. The contribution therefore lies not in introducing a completely unprecedented theoretical combination but in providing a systematic conceptual explanation of how the affective, ritualistic, and platform-mediated dimensions of contemporary communication can be collectively described theoretically.

2. Rite and Media Rituals

2.1. The Theoretical Roots and Interpretation of Ritual in Communication Theory

The concept of ritual is interdisciplinary; cultural anthropology (van Gennep, Turner), sociology (Durkheim), and religious studies (Bell) have all contributed to the development of its meaning (van Gennep, 2007; Turner et al., 2017; Durkheim, 2004; Bell, 1992/2009). The common starting point of these approaches is that ritual is not understood as a mere religious or traditional practice, but as a socially constructed, reality-shaping mechanism. Rituals are collective actions that help maintain the order of the social world, create shared meanings and stabilize everyday life. The phenomenological approach complements this by examining reality as an intersubjective construction in which ritual ensures the interpretability of the experiential world (Holdrege, 1990). According to religious scholar Catherine Bell, ritual is not a static entity, but rather arises in the process of ritualization, during which an action is given a symbolically structured form (Bell, 1992/2009). The concept of ritualization was partly transferred to the social sciences from ethology and denotes the process during which behavior becomes symbolic and formalized. The biological and evolutionary foundations of ritual are also examined by human ethology. According to Vilmos Csányi, ritual is a species-specific human behavior that is the result of the interaction of genetic and cultural factors (Csányi, 1999, pp. 124–125). Ritual serves the synchronization of group life, which includes emotional coordination (empathy), behavioral rites (music, dance), and rule-following. In this interpretation, the fundamental function of ritual is social coordination, which also explains why it appears in communities of different sizes and types, from direct human interactions to mediated mass communication. In other words, ritual operates not only in present but also in mediated forms. According to the sociological approach, rituals are tools of social integration, reducing conflicts, reinforcing norms and promoting community cohesion. According to Durkheim’s classic definition, ritual is a means of self-affirmation of society (Durkheim, 2004, p. 353). Structuralist and cultural anthropology—especially Lévi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz—interprets ritual as part of symbolic systems. Culture is a network of meanings made up of symbols, in which ritual plays a prominent role in stabilizing meanings. According to Geertz, ritual is the space where “reality and the imagined world become one” (Geertz, 1973). Rites convey condensed meanings through expressive forms that operate not only in religious but also in secular contexts. At the same time, rituals, as systems containing cultural patterns, are not homogeneous, but can make physical and symbolic reality experiential—precisely through the modes of experience they legitimize. In ritual, the world in which we live and the world we imagine become one (Bell, 1992/2009, p. 1).

2.2. From Ritual Theory of Communication to Media Rituals

Since the 1960s, media researchers have noticed similarities between modern media communication and the rituals of traditional societies and have therefore sought to develop ritual theory into a general theory of communication and media. The development of the ritual model of communication can be attributed to James Carey, who, starting in the 1960s, gradually developed the theoretical perspective that later became one of the defining points of reference for the cultural-interpretive turn in communication. The significance of the ritual model lies partly in the fact that it breaks with the transmissional understanding of communication and instead interprets communication as a cultural process in which social reality is continuously reproduced (Carey, 2009, p. 19). This places the emphasis on meaning-making, the maintenance of a shared symbolic world, and the performative reinforcement of social order. However, order is not understood in a political sense, but in terms of the common order of interpreting experiences. Man does not live alone, in isolation, but in communities, and to exist in a community, coordination and mechanisms ensuring coordination are necessary. Rite is one of these mechanisms. (Rothenbuhler, 1998, p. X) A comprehensive contemporary interpretation of ritual theory is given by John Pauly, who places Carey’s thinking in both a historical and theoretical context (Pauly, 2014). On the one hand, Pauly explores the disciplinary antecedents of the ritual approach, and on the other hand, he presents its further development directions in various fields of communication and media studies (Pauly, 2014).

The work of Daniel Dayan, Elihu Katz and Nick Couldry played a decisive role in the further theoretical development of ritual communication. In their 1992 book Media events: The live broadcasting of history, Dayan and Katz used the term media events to describe television broadcasts that mobilize large audiences, interrupting everyday time and creating collective rituals of attention (Dayan & Katz, 1992). In addition to reintegrating society, these media ceremonies recreate social reality itself and, at the same time, social publicity. Media events (contests, conquests, coronations) occur outside the media, during which viewers can see the historical event in a live but pre-planned broadcast. The broadcast reaches a wide audience; viewers watch in groups rather than individually, actively celebrate, and this celebration also has its normative rules. Media events are ultimately performative practices related to the use of media (Dayan & Katz, 1992, p. 78). Media events offer a new way of experiencing ritual with the help of technology by enabling audiences to encounter ceremonies from perspectives that would previously have been inaccessible such as aerial or close-up views. The ceremony is one around which the media builds a liturgical context and dramatizes the event. The difference between the affective online media rituals proposed in this study and Dayan and Katz’s concept of media events is primarily temporal and structural. Media events refer to exceptional, socially significant occasions that are ceremonially mediated and that can gather large audiences around a common event. In contrast, affective online media rituals need not be exceptional, centrally organized, or tied to a single event. They can be created through repeated, platform-mediated participation in both everyday and extraordinary contexts. Their defining characteristic is therefore not event-likeness or social scale, but the ritualization of affective participation through patterned repetition and shared social meaning.

British media scholar Nick Couldry describes the concept of “media rituals” as a mechanism for the reproduction of symbolic power, emphasizing that the media not only reflect but also structure social reality. Couldry’s theory addresses the issue of ritual media power through the myth of the “mediated center”. According to his starting point, the most important effect of the media lies not in the content of individual messages, but in the fact that they constantly maintain the idea that society has a center to which all meanings are related. This “center” is not an empirical reality, but a culturally and institutionally maintained myth in the operation of which the media play a key role (Couldry, 2003, p. 1). According to Couldry, media rituals are the key mechanism in the social legitimization of the distribution of symbolic power. The media help us imagine ourselves as connected to the social world. According to his definition, media rituals are “formalized actions that are organized around media-related categories and boundaries and that performatively frame the relationship with media-related values” (Couldry, 2003, p. 29). This approach differs from classical ritual theories in several respects. While other authors interpret rituals primarily as emotional integration and community belonging, Couldry’s emphasis is more on the organization of cognitive categories. Media rituals not only create feelings of community, but also determine how we think about media, society and power. One of Couldry’s most important claims is that the media do not simply reflect the social order, but themselves create and institutionalize it (Couldry, 2003, p. 46). Following Couldry and several other theorists, television should therefore not be understood as merely a neutral medium through which pre-existing social rituals are transmitted. The medium itself contributes to the formation of ritual forms that emerge around it. Its specific technological and institutional features—including broadcasting, program structures, genre conventions, repetitive formats, temporal simultaneity, and established patterns of audience consumption—shape how audiences encounter, repeat, and collectively organize media practices. Television genres, such as reality formats, live broadcasts, series, and television ceremonies, can thus generate forms of repetition, anticipation, synchronization, and divided attention that become ritualized. In this sense, the ritualization of media use is already technologically and materially conditioned in the television context. The capabilities and limitations of digital platforms should therefore be understood not as the point at which technological mediation enters the formation of media rituals, but as a historically specific transformation of the constitutive role that media technologies have long played. This perspective is important for the transition from television-based media rituals to digital and platformized forms. The emergence of social media does not represent the first shift from a technologically mediated ritual to a different kind of technologically mediated ritual; rather, it represents a transformation in the way media technologies organize the conditions of ritual participation, repetition, visibility, and collective attention.

The power of media rituals is particularly evident in acts of representation and presentation. This is especially true of performative media platforms such as social media sites. The media not only communicate what is happening but also shape what is considered “important”, “visible” or “socially relevant”. Furthermore, they create and legitimize the social meaning of everything, not only by displaying common values, but also by creating their shared emotional reception. Through ritual, the media create the audience primarily with a common “gaze” and a common feeling. The common viewing of the ceremonial spectacle creates the media ritual. The media ritual is thereby also fixed in memory. In the analysis of the French media researcher Pascal Lardellier, the key moment in relation to media rituals is the creation of a common memory throughout. In his research, the French scholar identified five functions of ritual media: (1) it proves the real occurrence of the event, (2) it monumentalizes it by creating an official image of the event, (3) it legitimizes the event, (4) it vectorizes it, i.e., it extends it in time and space, and finally (5) it dramatizes it (Lardellier, 2005).

By the 2020s, media researchers had developed several typologies of online media rituals. Among them, we find one that is primarily focused on emotion management and will be discussed later (Gibbs et al., 2015; Burgess et al., 2018), while others focus on the value-based nature of online rituals. Among these, we can mention the research of Trillò and his colleagues (Trillò et al., 2022). Trillò, Hallinan and Shifman interpret social media rituals as typified communication practices that make stable, transnationally recurring patterns visible behind the seemingly chaotic user content (Trillò et al., 2022). The authors distinguish 16 types of rituals, which are organized along different cultural and communication logics, and whose basic function is to systematize the social values appearing in digital content (Trillò et al., 2022, pp. 5–8). In this approach, ritual is not merely a content category, but a normative–axiological structure, in which each ritual formalizes and reproduces a specific value system (e.g., reputation, care, knowledge, control, esthetics, loyalty) and a specific communication logic (e.g., authenticity, persuasion, affiliation or demonstration). One of the authors’ important observations is that these rituals do not appear in a platform-neutral manner but are organized in highly platform-dependent configurations. For example, Instagram particularly favors rituals of promotion and affiliation, while Twitter/X provides intense visibility for rituals of disclosure, demotion and political nature. Another important comparative dimension of the study is the concept of “locality”, which includes not only national cultures, but also transnational communities, platform subcultures and political movements. The present study, however, makes a conscious theoretical shift in relation to this approach. While Trillò et al. focus primarily on the ritual organization of values and communication norms, in this study, affects and emotional dynamics are at the center of the analysis. This means that I examine rites not only as value-bearing structures but also as practices that produce affective intensities. In this perspective, platform and cultural differences denote not only different value systems, but also different emotional regimes—namely, what affective attunements, emotional intensities, and collective resonances become visible, accepted, or even repressed in each digital environment. Thus, while Trillò and his colleagues draw a value-based map of rites, the present approach examines how these ritual forms become emotionally lived and communally shared affective experiences in platform publics.

The starting point of this study is that ritual is a complex social, cultural and communication phenomenon that simultaneously serves community integration, meaning-making and the structuring of reality (Andok, 2017). Among its functions, synchronization, repetition, identity reinforcement, and the maintenance of symbolic order play a prominent role. In the modern media environment, rituals do not disappear but continue to live on in new forms—especially in media events and social media trends. The ritual approach is therefore not just an alternative theoretical framework, but a fundamental way of interpreting how society creates and maintains shared realities through communication. While classical ritual theories primarily emphasized social integration, symbolic order, and collective identity, more recent scholarship has increasingly highlighted the affective dimension of ritual practices. Rituals do not merely organize social relations; they also generate, circulate, and intensify emotions. This affective dimension becomes particularly significant in contemporary digital media environments, where emotional expression and circulation constitute central mechanisms of participation and visibility. In digital media environments, emotional circulation increasingly becomes the very mechanism through which ritual participation is organized and collective attention is sustained.

3. Media Rituals and Emotions

3.1. From Emotional Representation to Affective Media Practices

Research on the relationship between media and emotions has a long history. Emotions have been examined both in the production and reception of media content and in interactions with media, where they influence perception, meaning-making, the integration of media experiences into memory, and the formation of individual and collective identities (Eder et al., 2019). Emotions may also constitute an important motivation for media use. Eder et al. (2019) distinguish four major areas within media-and-emotion research: the representation of emotions, the elicitation of emotional responses, the integration of emotions into media practices, and the broader emotional culture of media. For the present study, the latter two dimensions are particularly important because they shift the focus from emotions as properties of media content or individual responses toward emotions as elements of socially organized communicative practices. This shift is particularly significant in the transition from mass media to networked forms of communication. In social media environments, users are not merely recipients of mediated representations but also active producers of expressive content. As Boyd and Ellison observe, networked communication is characterized by the production and circulation of personalized content (Boyd & Ellison, 2007; Boyd, 2011). The development of digital communication has therefore expanded the possibilities for the public display of emotions. The transformation is visible even at the level of communicative forms. Early text-based online interfaces provided relatively limited means for conveying the non-verbal and emotional cues available in face-to-face interaction. Emoticons and, subsequently, emojis emerged partly as responses to this limitation (Wallace, 2016). Contemporary social media environments, by contrast, provide an extensive repertoire of affective expressions, including reactions, visual formats, emojis, stickers, hashtags, and other platform-specific forms of participation. Importantly, however, emotional expression in social media is not entirely unconstrained. Platforms establish normative and technological conditions for how emotions can be displayed, circulated, and recognized. The introduction of reaction buttons and other affective affordances, for example, explicitly incorporates emotional responses into the architecture of participation. Emotional expression is therefore simultaneously a communicative practice and a platform-mediated practice. This observation provides an important starting point for the present theoretical argument. The issue is not simply that digital media enable users to express more emotions, but that emotional expression can become organized into recurrent and socially recognizable forms of participation. Once such forms become repetitive, collectively oriented, and meaningful beyond the individual act of expression, they begin to take on the characteristics of ritualized communication.

3.2. The Affective Turn

The relationship between cognition, emotion, and ritualization has also been reconsidered in several theoretical traditions. From an ethological perspective, Csányi emphasizes the relationship between emotional mechanisms and rule-following in ritualization; emotions provide motivation, while rules shape the form of behavior (Csányi, 2015). Ritual performance consequently transforms potentially unregulated emotional responses into coordinated processes shared by a community. This perspective is particularly relevant to the present argument because it highlights the relationship between emotional intensity and patterned communicative form. The affective turn has further developed this perspective by challenging the treatment of emotions as merely internal psychological states. Affect has become an important theoretical category in social and media research over the past two decades. Although affect and emotion are often used interchangeably in everyday language, affect theory distinguishes between them analytically. Following Massumi, affect can be understood as a bodily, sensory, and often pre-reflexive intensity that precedes the conscious naming and cultural interpretation of emotion (Massumi, 2002). Emotion, by contrast, refers to an experience that has become culturally interpreted and socially communicable. Affect is therefore not simply an individual psychological state but a relational phenomenon emerging through interactions between bodies, communities, technologies, and social environments. Ahmed develops a complementary perspective by emphasizing the social circulation of emotions (Ahmed, 2004). Emotions do not simply reside within individuals; they organize social relations by becoming attached to bodies, groups, objects, and symbols. Through this process, emotions contribute to the formation of communal identities and social boundaries. This relational understanding of affect is particularly productive for the study of digital media. Political debates, fan communities, digital mourning, hashtag campaigns, and other forms of online participation demonstrate how emotional expressions can circulate beyond the individuals who initially produce them. In such contexts, affect is not merely a response to mediated content. It becomes part of the process through which users establish orientations toward events, persons, communities, and causes. The significance of this perspective for ritual theory is therefore twofold. First, it suggests that emotional intensity should not be treated merely as an outcome of ritual participation. Second, it indicates that affect may contribute to the formation and maintenance of ritualized communicative practices. Online communication can consequently be understood not simply as an exchange of information but as a potentially repetitive, emotionally saturated, and community-forming practice.

3.3. Affective Publics and Ritualized Participation

The connection between affect and networked communication is further developed in the concept of affective publics (Clough, 2008). Papacharissi’s analysis of networked political communication demonstrates how emotions and affective expression can organize digitally mediated forms of public participation (Papacharissi, 2015). Her analysis of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements emphasizes that networked connectivity alone does not produce collective action; narrative and discursive connectivity are also required. In this perspective, networked publics are not simply aggregations of individuals connected by technology. They are constituted through communicative practices in which expressions, narratives, and affective orientations circulate across networks. Affective publics may therefore be connected, mobilized, or fragmented through the public expression and circulation of emotions (Papacharissi, 2015). This perspective provides an important bridge between affect theory and ritual theory. Classical approaches to ritual communication emphasize repetition, synchronization, participation, shared meaning, and community formation. The concept of affective publics adds another dimension: collective participation may be organized through shared emotional orientations as well as through shared meanings or political objectives. Nevertheless, an affective public should not automatically be equated with a ritual community, and not every emotional expression constitutes a ritual. The concept of ritual requires additional characteristics: recurrence, patterned participation, collective orientation, and the reproduction of meanings, identities, or social boundaries. Empirical studies of digital mourning provide an illustrative point of departure. Burgess and colleagues demonstrate that reactions to celebrity deaths on social media can function as repetitive symbolic practices through which users participate in collective remembrance and negotiate community belonging (Burgess et al., 2018). Similarly, Gibbs et al. show how Instagram can become a ritualized space for mourning and remembrance, in which public emotional expression creates opportunities for community participation (Gibbs et al., 2015). These studies are important for the present framework not because they empirically validate the concept proposed here, but because they demonstrate that emotionally charged digital expressions can acquire ritual characteristics when they become repetitive, collectively oriented, and socially meaningful. They therefore provide an empirical indication of a phenomenon that requires further theoretical specification.

The concept of affective online media rituals is closely related to Papacharissi’s (2015) notion of affective publics, but the two concepts operate at different analytical levels. Affective publics describe networked formations in which affective expression, narrative, and connective participation organize collective engagement. The present concept focuses instead on the ritualized communicative practices through which such affective orientations are repeatedly enacted, circulated, and reinforced. An affective public may therefore provide the social configuration within which a ritualized practice occurs, whereas an affective online media ritual refers to the patterned communicative process through which affective participation acquires recurrent and socially meaningful form.

3.4. From Social Media Rituals to Affective Online Media Rituals

Research on social media rituals has already demonstrated that online communication contains recurring and recognizable ritual forms. Trillò, Hallinan, and Shifman, for example, identify typified communication practices through which stable and recurrent patterns become visible within the seemingly heterogeneous content of social media (Trillò et al., 2022). Their work demonstrates that online rituals are not platform-neutral; they are shaped by cultural contexts, communicative norms, and the affordances and visibility structures of platforms.

Trillò et al. provide the closest conceptual precedent because they explicitly identify recurring forms of ritualized communication on social media. The present framework extends this perspective in two directions. First, it places affect at the center of ritualization rather than treating it primarily as one possible dimension of social media ritual practices. Second, it situates ritualized affective participation within the infrastructural conditions of platformization, including visibility, datafication, and algorithmic circulation. The proposed concept therefore does not replace the notion of social media rituals; it specifies an affective subtype or analytical dimension of such rituals while extending the analysis toward their platformized conditions.

The present framework builds on this insight while introducing a specific theoretical shift. Existing approaches to social media rituals have primarily emphasized their normative, cultural, and communicative organization. The present study focuses instead on their affective dynamics, especially how ritualized practices generate, circulate, reinforce, and transform collective emotional orientations. The distinction is consequential. A social media ritual may reproduce a cultural norm or establish a recognizable pattern of participation, but an affective online media ritual additionally involves the organization of emotional intensity as part of the ritual process itself. Affect is therefore not treated as an accompanying feature of ritual communication but as one of its constitutive dimensions.

Repetition alone, however, does not constitute ritualization. Digital routines and habits may also involve recurrent actions, but their repetition does not necessarily carry the symbolic, affective, or collectively oriented significance characteristic of ritual. In the present framework, ritualization refers to the emergence of a recognizable and socially meaningful pattern in which repeated participation does more than reproduce an action: it reinforces shared meanings, identities, norms, emotional orientations, or forms of collective belonging. A routine is primarily characterized by recurrence and functional regularity, whereas a ritualized practice additionally acquires symbolic and relational significance for its participants. A habit may be repeated with little conscious or collective significance; a ritualized practice, by contrast, becomes meaningful through its patterned and socially recognizable performance. Accordingly, four characteristics may distinguish affective online media rituals from merely repetitive digital practices: (1) patterned recurrence, (2) affective intensity or alignment, (3) symbolic or relational significance, and (4) collective or socially recognizable participation. These characteristics need not be equally pronounced in every instance, but ritualization may become analytically meaningful when repetition is accompanied by affective and social significance.

On this basis, we can define affective online media rituals as repetitive, platform-mediated communication practices through which affective intensities and emotions are publicly expressed, circulated, reinforced, and transformed into shared experiences, identities, norms, or forms of collective action. Four elements are particularly important in this definition. First, these practices are repetitive; they involve recognizable forms of participation that recur over time or across users. Second, they are collectively oriented; their significance extends beyond individual emotional expression and contributes to shared orientations and experiences. Third, they are affectively charged; emotional intensity is not incidental but forms part of the communicative process. Fourth, they are platform-mediated, meaning that their visibility, circulation, and reproduction are shaped by the technological and institutional conditions of digital media. The fourth element requires particular attention. Affective online rituals do not occur in a neutral communicative environment. They take place within platforms that organize visibility, participation, circulation, and repetition. This introduces a dimension that distinguishes contemporary online rituals from many of their predigital forms.

3.5. Platformization and the Transformation of Ritual Dynamics

Theories of platformization, datafication, and deep mediatization provide the final theoretical component necessary for understanding this transformation. Since the late twentieth century, mediatization has increasingly come to describe not simply the emergence of new media but the transformation of social practices through the pervasive presence of media in everyday life (Couldry, 2003, 2009, 2012; Couldry & Hepp, 2017). Hepp’s concept of deep mediatization captures this development by emphasizing the increasing differentiation, connectivity, ubiquity, innovation, and datafication of the contemporary media environment (Hepp, 2020). Media are no longer merely separate channels through which social communication takes place; they have become deeply embedded infrastructures of social life. Datafication is particularly important in this context. Human activities and interactions are increasingly transformed into data that can be measured, processed, and used for economic, political, and technological purposes. Social media activities consequently generate continuous digital traces that can be incorporated into systems of classification, prediction, and selection. Platformization adds an institutional dimension to this process. As van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal demonstrate, platforms do not simply reflect social relations but participate in structuring them through mechanisms of datafication, commodification, and selection (van Dijck et al., 2018). Similarly, Gillespie emphasizes that platforms are not neutral technological infrastructures (Gillespie, 2018). Through moderation, recommendation, visibility rules, and other forms of governance, they shape the conditions under which communication becomes visible and socially consequential. This is particularly significant for affective communication. In platformized environments, emotional expressions can be transformed into measurable signals of participation and engagement. Practices such as liking, sharing, commenting, and reacting simultaneously function as expressions of affect and as data points within platform infrastructures. The implication for ritual theory is substantial. In classical accounts, ritual repetition is primarily generated and maintained through the participation of communities. In platformized communication, repetition and visibility can also be technologically organized. Algorithmic selection may increase the visibility of content that generates substantial interaction, while increased visibility can expose additional users to the same affective expressions and thereby encourage further participation. The ritual process can thus be understood as a socio-technically mediated cycle of repetition and amplification. Emotional participation generates interaction; interaction produces data; data become part of systems of algorithmic selection; algorithmic selection increases visibility; and increased visibility creates opportunities for further participation. This process does not imply that algorithms mechanically determine emotional communication. Rather, it suggests that affective user practices and platform infrastructures can become mutually reinforced. The contemporary media ritual is therefore neither purely socially generated nor purely technologically produced. It emerges through the interaction of human participation, affective intensity, platform architecture, and algorithmic selection.

This provides the theoretical basis for the algorithmic feedback loop proposed in the next section. The concept extends the conventional understanding of ritual by suggesting that the collective emotional intensities traditionally associated with ritual participation may, under conditions of platformization, become technologically amplified through recurrent cycles of participation, datafication, visibility, and renewed participation.

4. Deep Mediatization, Algorithmic Feedback Loop

Since the end of the twentieth century, the constructions in which people present their social world have transformed because of the pervasive, inescapably present mediatization (Couldry & Hepp, 2017). People’s communication and social practices have changed, and the reason for these changes is the medial transformation. The institutionalization and materialization of newly emerging communicative practices—and perhaps we can add, their legitimation—are ensured by the media (Couldry, 2003, 2009, 2012; Couldry & Hepp, 2017). According to Hepp and Couldry, the nature of mediatization has fundamentally changed in the past two decades. While previously, mediatization was primarily related to the emergence of new media, in the digital era we can already speak of the transformation of the entire media environment. Digital media no longer function as a separate communication channel but have become the infrastructure of social life. Hepp identifies this as deep mediatization and distinguishes five fundamental trends: differentiation, connectivity, ubiquity, innovation and datafication (Hepp, 2020). Datafication refers to the increasing diversity of the media environment. In addition to traditional media, countless digital platforms and forms of communication are emerging. Connectivity means that people, devices and institutions are connected to each other in a networked system. Ubiquity refers to the constant presence of media in everyday life, while innovation emphasizes the continuous acceleration of technological change. Datafication refers to the process by which human actions can be transformed into digital data and processed. Datafication is one of the most important and problematic aspects of deep mediatization. The concept of datafication was developed by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier and refers to the fact that in the era of big data, human behavior becomes measurable and predictable in real time (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013). Digital devices continuously collect data about users, often without their full awareness. Online searches, social media activities, location data or shopping habits all leave digital traces. This data can later be used for economic, political or technological purposes. Research on deep mediatization should therefore not be limited to examining media users but should also consider the role of large technology companies. Companies such as Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta or Microsoft are no longer just technology companies, but also key players in the infrastructure of social communication. Their platforms and algorithms fundamentally influence the information we access, how we communicate with each other, and how our social relationships are organized (van Dijck, 2012, 2014; van Dijck & Poell, 2015). In his recent co-authored volume The Platform Society, Dutch media researcher Jose van Dijck also explored the broader context of datafication (van Dijck et al., 2018). In their analysis, online platforms are attributed a prominent role in the functioning of society because most of our social and economic interactions take place through them. Moreover, these platforms do not reflect society, but on the contrary, they construct the social structure in which we live (van Dijck et al., 2018, p. 2). We cannot consider them neutral or value-free; on the contrary, they have their own norms and values, which are reflected in the architecture of the platforms, for example, in what the social media site displays on the wall of each profile and what it hides (van Dijck et al., 2018). Researchers believe that in platform-based societies, value systems can come into conflict, namely, the values of the private sphere and the public sphere. There are some that receive more attention from legal regulation and public interest, such as consumer protection, and privacy protection, while others receive less attention, such as accountability, transparency and democratic control. When describing the operation of platforms, we encounter the concept of datafication. Researchers see the foundations of the operation of the platform society in three main mechanisms: datafication, commodification and selection. Social relationships, behavioral patterns, emotions and ideas transformed into data become easily marketable goods. Large numbers of shares and rapid spread have become more important, even at the expense of the factual content of the news. It is clearly visible from the data on platformized news consumption that affective content is much more viral, spreads across a wider network and faster than news that requires more serious elaboration by the recipient. This will encourage those who commission the relevant data to support the production and distribution of affective content, effectively driving media consumption into a spiral of emotional dominance.

In the affective public, media users are connected through affective anchors and signifiers. However, this networked connectedness in the contemporary digital environment no longer occurs in a neutral, technological vacuum. The flow of affect and ritual participation is fundamentally structured, channeled, and transformed by digital platforms themselves, which convert emotional expressions into quantifiable data (datafication) and then amplify this data through feedback loops to maximize engagement. When Durkheim wrote about the integrative role of rituals, he used the concept of collective effervescence to describe the almost trance-like emotional alignment that occurs during physical togetherness, during which the community self-excites and ritually reinforces its own sacred symbols. In online space, however, this ritual self-excitation undergoes a fundamental structural change: emotional amplification is no longer carried out by the presence of the physical crowd but by the platforms’ background algorithms. The platforms’ business model is based on the attention economy, whose currency is user engagement. Affect theory, including the work of Massumi and Ahmed, points out that pre-reflexive affects and intense emotions (especially moral outrage, anger, explicit fear or fan euphoria) trigger the fastest and most intense reactivity, and algorithms “reward” these contents with the highest visibility. This creates an algorithmic feedback loop. This can be described with the following steps. As a starting point, the media user reacts to an event with ritual expressiveness (e.g., an outraged comment or like). The platform immediately datafies this affect. Detecting this affective intensity, the algorithm may distribute the content to the newsfeeds of additional users—though not in a deterministic manner. This can potentially trigger further ritualized reactions, thereby generating a kind of digital “emotional spiral,” although it may also result in a “chilling effect” in the opposite direction.

We can see that the online form of the media ritual is thus artificially stimulated. The algorithm does not “sense” affect in the human or psychological meaning of the term. Instead, platform systems operationalize affective activity through observable behavioral and interactional signals that can be collected, aggregated, ranked, and incorporated into computational selection processes. The algorithmic feedback loop—an algorithmically mediated recursive mechanism—proposed here refers to a recurrent sociotechnical process in which affectively charged user activity generates observable behavioral and interactional data; platform systems process these signals through aggregation, ranking, recommendation, or personalization mechanisms; the resulting distribution of visibility shapes subsequent exposure and engagement; and this renewed engagement generates additional data that feed back into the platform’s computational processes. The concept does not assume that algorithms directly sense or measure affect as a psychological state. Instead, affect becomes computationally actionable through observable proxies of participation and engagement. These can be reactions, comments, shares, viewing or interaction patterns, posting frequency, hashtag participation, and other platform-specific behavioral signals. The precise signals, their relative weighting, and the mechanisms that influence visibility vary across platforms and are often only partially observable to users and researchers. The analytical value of the feedback loop model therefore lies not in stating a universal algorithmic law, but in identifying a set of potentially observable relationships between affective participation, data generation, computational selection, visibility, and renewed participation, emphasizing possibilities over determinism. The algorithmic feedback loop must also be situated within the political economy of platforms. From the perspective of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), behavioral data is not simply a by-product of communication but an economically valuable resource that can be appropriated, processed, and used for prediction and behavior modification. Similarly, Srnicek’s account of platform capitalism emphasizes the economic centrality of platforms as infrastructures for extracting, processing, and monetizing data (Srnicek, 2017). In this perspective, affective participation is not only a form of social or communicative engagement; it can also constitute economically valuable behavioral data. The algorithmic feedback loop should therefore not be understood as a neutral communication process. It operates within infrastructures whose commercial goals, data management practices, and governance systems shape which forms of participation become visible, measurable, and potentially amplified. I argue that affectively charged user engagement can generate observable behavioral signals that can contribute to varying degrees of platform-mediated visibility. The relationship between affective engagement and subsequent visibility varies according to platform-specific reach, ranking and recommendation mechanisms, and governance systems. Increased visibility can create additional opportunities for exposure and renewed engagement, thereby generating additional behavioral data that can feed back into platform selection processes. Algorithmic amplification does not necessarily result in sustained affective engagement or political effectiveness; the feedback loop may weaken or cease if further interaction, visibility, or engagement does not occur.

5. Main Functions and Types of Affective Online Media Rituals

A great deal of literature and analysis on the affective media effects of the Internet relies on the concept of the British cultural researcher Raymond Williams, the structure of feelings, the deep community of real, vivid feelings that make communication possible (Williams, 1965/2003, pp. 37–38). In his analysis of the concept and meanings of culture, Williams further considers Fromm’s ‘social character’ and Anderson’s ‘cultural pattern’. “[…] Perhaps we can sense a further common element, which is neither character nor pattern, but rather a kind of former experiential experience of these phenomena. […] I propose the concept of the structure of feelings to describe it. […] In a certain sense, the structure of feelings constitutes the culture of an era.” (Williams, 1965/2003, p. 37). Nowadays, network communication and online media provide the basis for the emotional culture of our era, and this is where affective online media rituals also appear. In the final chapter of my study, I would like to outline what we can say about the functions of affective online media rituals, based on the previously presented scientific background. And what typology can be established regarding affective online media rituals in relation to these functions. In order to establish our own typology of affective online media rituals, it is worth examining how the conventional television ritual functions identified by Pascal Lardellier (2005) and presented earlier in the study are transformed: proving that the event really happened, making it monumental by creating an official image of the event, legitimizing the event, vectorizing the event, i.e., extending it in time and space, and finally dramatizing it (Lardellier, 2005).

In affective publics, the proof of the event’s occurrence is validated through rituals of affective authentication and through appeals to subjective truth and lived experiences. In the network, the evidence is no longer the image of the official camera, but the expressive sharing of lived, subjective experience (e.g., live streaming, TikTok “storytime”). The event becomes “real” when masses begin to resonate with it in the same emotional tone (solidarity, anger).

In affective publics, monumentalization becomes fragmented monumentality. It is not a single, central image that is created (as in the royal wedding), but the mass of user content flow (memes, hashtag clouds, duets) that gives monumentality. The magnitude of the event is demonstrated by the millions of reaches, viral trends and shares (hyper-visibility).

The basis of legitimacy shifts from institutional authority to grassroots (vernacular) or horizontal, networked recognition. If a networked audience gets behind a cause and a common moral stance is formed through the “stickiness” of affects, the cause becomes ritually legitimized (or delegitimized, e.g., cancel culture). We can also consider this a kind of connective legitimacy.

Vectorization in affective publics is carried out by algorithms, which can open global ritual spaces in minutes (e.g., a worldwide hashtag movement). Temporality also changes: the rite does not end with airtime; due to archives, remixes and algorithms, ritual affects can be continuously reactivated (continuous present tense). In other words, vectorization occurs algorithmically, and the media ritual is placed in a transnational spatial–temporal dimension.

Dramatization becomes decentralized, as users themselves dramatize the event with platform-specific performative tools (TikTok sound effects, dramatic cuts, extremely polarized language on X). The stakes of drama here are to maintain the affective intensity, without which ritual attention would fade.

This overview suggests that in the online environment, affective media rituals are no longer static, consensual tools of social integration (as in Durkheim or Lardellier). Rather, they may be conceptualized as dynamic performative practices that derive their reality-shaping capacity from algorithmically amplified emotional intensity. Building on this interpretation, the specific functions and types of affective online media rituals can be identified. In my study, I distinguish eight functions on this basis and identify four corresponding types. The functions are as follows: affective alignment, community formation, legitimation and normalization, political mobilization, visibility production, moral framing and evaluation, and digital commemoration.

• Affective alignment: One of the most fundamental functions is emotional alignment: participants respond to the same event, person or cause in a similar affective way. This can be grief, outrage, joy, solidarity or hope. An important aspect is “feeling at the same time” (temporal synchronization).
• Community formation: Affective rituals create communities, even if these are loose, networked forms. These can be hashtag communities (#MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter), the rituals participate in the formation of the boundaries of “us” and “them” in both cultural and political terms.
• Legitimation and normalization: Affective media rituals do not simply convey emotions or create communal experiences but can also have a legitimizing function. In this case, legitimation is not necessarily understood in a political sense but as the process in which certain values, identities, actors, narratives or institutions become socially accepted, naturalized and self-evident. In this process, emotions function as legitimizing resources; for example, mourning can legitimize a collective memory; outrage can legitimize a political movement; pride can legitimize a communal identity; solidarity can legitimize social action; or hope can legitimize political change. But we must add that legitimisation no longer only stems from community participation but is also partly shaped by the visibility logics of platforms.
• Political mobilization: Affective intensity can translate into action, such as organizing protests, petitions, boycotts, or intensifying campaigns. Affective online media rituals often enable rapid and intense affective mobilization with a low participation threshold, but this asymmetry is not universal: affective intensity and participation vary depending on platform logics, community norms, and algorithmic visibility mechanisms.
• Visibility production: Affective rituals increase the visibility of a cause on platforms: through trending, viral spread, and algorithmic highlighting.
• Moral framing and evaluation: Affective reactions are often organized into moral judgments along the dimensions of “right/wrong,” “acceptable/unacceptable,” or even “victim/perpetrator.”
• Memory and archiving (digital commemoration): Affective rituals create digital memory through anniversary posts, reinterpretations of tragedies, and the maintenance of collective memory space.
• Relational maintenance: The function refers to the capacity of affective online media rituals to sustain, reinforce, and renew interpersonal relationships through recurrent forms of mediated interaction. Such rituals may include greetings, expressions of care, shared celebrations, everyday check-ins, or repeated practices of emotional support that reaffirm relational bonds. Their primary function is not necessarily to create new communities, but to maintain existing relationships and a sense of interpersonal continuity across time and distance. Through repetition and recognizable affective expression, these practices can provide participants with reassurance, belonging, and a shared sense of relational presence. In this configuration, the ritual character emerges not from repetition alone but from the socially meaningful and affectively charged role that recurrent communication plays in sustaining relationships.

Based on these eight functions, we can create a four-element typology for classifying affective online media rituals. The four types are as follows: memorial affective rituals, activist/mobilization affective rituals, identity/community-building affective rituals, everyday affective rituals. Since these are theoretical categories, it is likely that mixed types will also be identified during their empirical testing.

5.1. Conceptual and Analytical Basis of the Typology

The typology proposed below requires clarification concerning both its scope and its analytical basis. The four types should not be understood as an exhaustive classification of all possible affective online media rituals. Rather, they represent four ideal-typical configurations identified based on recurring combinations of functions, temporal orientations, and modes of collective participation. The typology is therefore intended as an analytical heuristic that facilitates comparison across different manifestations of affective online media rituals rather than as a closed empirical taxonomy.

Three dimensions are particularly relevant to the differentiation of the types. The first is their dominant temporal orientation, whether ritualized affective participation is primarily oriented toward the past, the present, or the continuation of everyday social relations. The second is their dominant social function, including commemoration, mobilization, identity and belonging, or relational maintenance. The third concerns the mode and scope of collective participation through which affect is organized, ranging from broad public participation and issue-based mobilization to more bounded forms of identification and routine interpersonal interaction. These dimensions are analytically related to the eight functions identified above, but they operate at a higher level of abstraction: the eight functions describe what affective online media rituals may accomplish, whereas the typology distinguishes recurrent configurations in which these functions become dominant. The four types should therefore be treated as ideal-typical rather than mutually exclusive categories. A particular online practice may simultaneously perform several functions and display characteristics associated with more than one type. Classification refers to the dominant configuration of the practice rather than to exclusive category membership. This distinction is particularly important in platform environments, where the same communicative practice may change function as it circulates across contexts and audiences.

The eight functions and the four types therefore represent two different analytical levels. The functions identify what affective online media rituals do; the types identify how these functions tend to cluster into recurrent configurations.

5.1.1. Memorial Affective Rituals

Memorial affective rituals are primarily oriented toward the past and organize collective emotional responses around death, loss, remembrance, or commemorative events. Their dominant functions are memory and digital commemoration, affective alignment, and the maintenance or reconstruction of collective identity. Their ritual character derives from recurrent forms of remembrance and from the public synchronization of emotional responses. Digital mourning practices, commemorative hashtags, and anniversary-based participation are typical manifestations.

Dominant configuration:

• Temporal orientation: past
• Dominant function: memory/commemoration
• Participation: collective remembrance
• Typical scope: networked public/community

5.1.2. Activist/Mobilization Affective Rituals

Activist/mobilization affective rituals are oriented primarily toward present or anticipated collective action. Their dominant functions are political mobilization, visibility production, moral evaluation, and affective alignment. They organize emotional intensities around issues, events, or perceived injustices and transform these intensities into recognizable forms of public participation. Hashtag activism, collective outrage, solidarity campaigns, and digitally coordinated protest practices may take this form.

A further limitation concerns the relationship between affective online mobilization and consequential collective action. Research on slacktivism has questioned the assumption that low-cost forms of online participation necessarily translate into sustained political engagement or offline collective action. From this perspective, sharing, liking, hashtagging, or expressing solidarity may generate substantial affective visibility without producing durable organizational commitment or material political effects. The present framework therefore does not equate affective intensity or participation with political effectiveness. Activist or mobilizing affective rituals should be understood as forms of affective and communicative mobilization whose political consequences remain contingent and require empirical investigation.

Dominant configuration:

• Temporal orientation: present/future
• Dominant function: mobilization
• Participation: collective action
• Scope: networked public/issue-based public

5.1.3. Identity/Community-Building Affective Rituals

The notion of community is used here in a deliberately qualified sense. It does not assume that every form of digitally mediated collective participation constitutes a community in the strong sociological sense of a stable, territorially or institutionally bounded social group. Rather, the term refers to varying degrees of perceived belonging, shared identity, mutual orientation, and repeated participation. In this respect, online collectivities may range from relatively loose networked publics to more durable communities with shared norms and identities. The concept of community-building in the present framework therefore denotes the production or reinforcement of a sense of collective belonging, rather than presupposing the existence of a fully constituted community. Such digitally mediated collectivities may be weak, transient, fragmented, or strategically assembled rather than communities in a strong sociological sense. The analytical relevance of ritualization does not depend on resolving this ontological question in favor of “community”: ritualized participation may produce a sense of belonging or collective orientation without necessarily producing a durable community.

Identity- and belonging-oriented affective rituals organize repeated affective participation around shared identities, values, interests, or cultural affiliations. Their dominant functions are community formation, affective alignment, legitimation, and the reinforcement of symbolic boundaries. The term “community” is used here in a broad analytical sense, referring to different degrees of perceived belonging and shared identification rather than presupposing a stable or bounded social group. Fan practices, identity-based hashtags, recurring celebratory practices, and other forms of affiliative participation may constitute this type.

Dominant configuration:

• Temporal orientation: ongoing/recurrent
• Dominant function: identity formation and reinforcement of belonging
• Mode of participation: affiliative participation and identity affirmation
• Typical collective scope: community/networked public

5.1.4. Everyday Affective Rituals

Everyday affective rituals are embedded in routine interpersonal and platform-mediated communication. Their dominant functions are relational maintenance, affective alignment, identity reinforcement, and the normalization of everyday interaction. Unlike memorial or activist rituals, they are not necessarily organized around extraordinary events or explicit collective action. Rather, their ritual character emerges from repetition and routinization: recurring greetings, reactions, supportive exchanges, celebratory practices, and other low-intensity forms of affective participation may contribute to the maintenance of social ties and shared expectations. Their ritual character does not derive from routinization alone, but from the way recurrent interpersonal practices acquire socially recognizable affective and relational significance.

Dominant configuration:

• Temporal orientation: everyday/recurrent
• Dominant function: relational maintenance and affective alignment
• Mode of participation: routine interpersonal interaction
• Typical collective scope: interpersonal/small-scale networks

These dimensions are analytical rather than empirical measurement variables. They identify the dominant configuration of each ideal type and provide a common basis for comparison.

Affective online media rituals are repetitive communication practices taking place on platforms in which affective (emotionally intensive) participation is not merely an accompanying phenomenon, but a structuring force. These rituals simultaneously create collective emotional synchronization, communal identity and social meaning systems.

6. Theoretical Contribution and Implications

This article argues that the contemporary platform environment requires a reinterpretation of media rituals in terms of affect. While ritual theory has traditionally explained how communication reproduces symbolic order, collective identity, and social cohesion (Carey, 2009; Dayan & Katz, 1992; Couldry, 2003), and affect theory has shown how emotions circulate in digitally networked publics (Papacharissi, 2015), these traditions have developed largely independently of each other. At the same time, scholarship on platformization and deep mediatization has convincingly demonstrated that digital platforms actively organize communication through infrastructures of datafication, algorithmic selection, and visibility (Gillespie, 2018; van Dijck et al., 2018; Hepp, 2020), but these approaches rarely articulate the ritualistic nature of these communication processes. The article brings together and systematically articulates insights from three established bodies of scholarship—media ritual theory, affect theory, and platformization studies—to develop a conceptual framework for understanding affective online media rituals. While previous scholarship has already explored important intersections between these traditions, the present article focuses on their convergence and specifies how ritualized affective participation can be conceptualized under conditions of platformization. Regarding the processes described in the study, I conceptualize affective online media rituals and algorithmic feedback loops not as processes that operate in a universal and deterministic manner.

The primary theoretical contribution of this article is to systematically articulate the intersection of these three established strands of scholarship within a single conceptual framework. The concept of affective online media rituals proposed here extends classical ritual theory in several important ways. First, it shifts the analytical focus from ceremonial media events and institutional rituals to everyday, platform-mediated communication practices. In contemporary digital environments, ritual participation no longer depends on exceptional historical events but is manifested through countless repetitive micro-actions—liking, sharing, commenting, reacting, hashtagging, commemorating, celebrating, or expressing outrage. Collectively, these seemingly insignificant practices can generate recognizable ritual forms that continuously reproduce shared emotional orientations and collective interpretations of social reality. Second, the proposed concept integrates affect into the definition of media rituals themselves. While previous theories of ritual have primarily emphasized symbolic integration, normative order, or collective identity, the current framework argues that emotional synchronization constitutes an equally fundamental dimension of ritual communication. Digital rituals do not simply organize meanings; they organize feelings. They transform individual emotional expressions into collectively experienced affective atmospheres through ongoing interaction, repetition, and visibility. In this sense, emotions should not be seen as secondary outcomes of ritual participation, but as one of its constitutive mechanisms. Third, the article argues that contemporary media rituals cannot be understood independently of the infrastructures of various platforms. Unlike traditional broadcast rituals, affective online media rituals unfold in algorithmically curated environments, where visibility, traffic, and participation are continuously shaped by platform logic. Platforms do not simply provide ritual communication; they actively organize, amplify, prioritize, and sometimes suppress individual affective expressions. Consequently, ritual participation becomes inseparable from processes of datafication and algorithmic control. At the same time, it is necessary to emphasize the non-deterministic nature of the above process, its platform dependency, and the need for empirical research on the subject.

The concept of the algorithmic feedback loop introduced in this article further extends existing ritual theory by explaining how platforms can transform emotional participation into self-reinforcing cycles of visibility. Classical ritual theories, from Durkheim to Carey, have described collective emotional intensity as an emergent feature of community participation. Digital platforms, by contrast, institutionalize and technologically accelerate this process. Emotional responses become measurable data, data become signals for algorithmic recommendations, recommendations generate further participation, and new participation generates further emotional intensity, even to the point of extremism. However, we should not view this process as a matter of inevitability. Collective emotional expressions can thus become partly platform-generated rather than solely socially generated. This represents a fundamental transformation in the mechanisms through which ritual solidarity or conflict is produced in digital societies. The theoretical framework provides a bridge between the study of rituals and research on affective publics. Papacharissi’s concept of affective publics explains how emotional expression organizes networked political participation. The current article suggests that these publics can also be understood as ritual communities whose cohesion depends not only on shared opinions or political goals, but also on repeated communicative performances that publicly enact shared emotional orientations. This perspective highlights the ritual dimensions of affective publics and demonstrates that repeated communicative practices are essential for the maintenance of collective emotional engagement over time.

In addition to its conceptual contribution, the proposed framework also provides an analytical approach for future empirical research. The definition and typology of affective online media rituals offer a basis for identifying and comparing ritual forms across platforms, cultures, and political contexts. They allow us to examine how specific ritual practices emerge, develop, how platform architectures influence their dissemination, and how different emotional repertoires are institutionalized within the digital public sphere. The concept can therefore contribute not only to research on media rituals, but also to the study of platform governance, digital political communication, fan cultures, social movements, disinformation, and algorithmically amplified polarization. Finally, this theoretical framework calls for a broader rethinking of ritual in deeply mediated societies. If ritual has historically been understood as a mechanism through which societies reproduce shared meanings and identities, contemporary digital platforms increasingly constitute the environments in which these processes take place. Rituals continue to play a central role in social integration, but their organization has shifted from predominantly institutional and personal environments to continuously connected, data-driven, and algorithmically mediated communication environments. Understanding these transformations requires theoretical models that can integrate symbolic meaning, emotional circulation, and technological infrastructures. The concept of affective online media rituals represents a possible step towards such an integrated theory of communication under conditions of platformized deep mediatization.

7. Limitations and Further Research Directions

The present study has sought to develop a theoretical framework by introducing the concept of “affective online media rituals”, and is therefore necessarily subject to several limitations. The most important limitation is that the concept in its current form is primarily conceptual and interpretive, and only partially relies on empirical validation. The connection of classical theories of ritual communication (Carey, 2009; Couldry, 2003) and theories of affect (Massumi, 2002; Ahmed, 2004) allows for the opening of a new interpretive horizon. However, in its current state, the concept can be considered an analytical tool that can be refined and tested with further empirical research. Another important limitation arises from the fact that the study focuses primarily on publicly accessible online interactions, while a significant part of digital affective dynamics is organized at the algorithmic and infrastructural level. Factors such as platforms’ recommendation systems, visibility logics, or content ranking have only been partially examined, even though they fundamentally determine which affective forms become collectively perceptible and repetitive. Similarly, less visible forms of user behavior—such as passive consumption or non-interactive presence—are also outside the focus of this analysis, while they are defining elements of the functioning of digital publics.

Taken together, these critical perspectives place important limits on the proposed framework. Affective online media rituals should not be equated with every form of repetition, with strong or durable community formation, with political efficacy, or with technologically determined amplification. Nor should the algorithmic feedback loop be understood as an autonomous computational process detached from the economic and institutional interests of platforms. The framework is therefore best understood as a conceptual model of possible configurations and mechanisms rather than as a universal law of digital communication. Its analytical value lies precisely in making these relationships available for empirical examination while remaining attentive to their contingency and limits.

A key question for further research is the operationalization of affective online media rituals. It is currently unclear what empirical indicators could be used to consider a given online phenomenon as ritualistic. Repetitive interaction patterns, the temporal organization of collective participation, and measurable forms of affective intensity could be possible starting points. However, it is important to emphasize that affects cannot be reduced to purely quantitative indicators, as a significant part of them is pre-cognitive, bodily, and relational in nature. Consequently, future research is expected to require a mixed methodological approach that combines quantitative (e.g., sentiment analysis or network analysis) and qualitative interpretive methods.

The further development of the concept suggests several possible research directions. One such direction is the development of an empirically grounded typology that can distinguish between different affective ritual forms, such as rituals related to political events, platform-specific trend-based rituals, or collective affective responses to crisis situations. Such a typology could help avoid the homogenization of the concept and make it a more precise analytical tool. Another important research direction is the investigation of the role of algorithmic mediation. Platforms are not just mediating surfaces, but active structuring forces that determine the conditions of affective visibility. This raises the question of the extent to which affective online rituals can be considered as “platform-generated” phenomena, and how algorithms may shape the intensity and patterns of participation. Finally, an important area of research could be the investigation of the temporality of affective online rituals. In the digital environment, affective cycles often accelerate, become short-lived, and then quickly disappear, creating new types of collective memory structures. In this context, it is worth examining how these ritual patterns emerge, peak, and decline, and how they become fixed—if at all—in the collective memory of platforms.