Sharing feelings about neighborhood transformation on Facebook: online affective placemaking in Amsterdam-Noord

Social media have become important platforms for residents to engage with their neighborhood. This paper investigates two Facebook communities that focus in distinctly different ways on Amsterdam-Noord, a gentrifying neighborhood in Amsterdam. Dialogue on both Facebook communities is found to be thoroughly affective, but the kinds of emotions and the way such emotions are generated and shared differ. Through this analysis, this paper seeks to understand how “affective publics” emerge through a specific form of collaborative storytelling, characterized by tone, form as well as rhythm of online interaction. We show how the channeling of affective expression and attunement helps to build two dissimilar collaborative discourses of the neighborhood transformation. We propose the term online affective placemaking to study and articulate such processes. The term points to mediated feelings and urgency to engage, which bonds participants and impacts the social and political landscape within the neighborhood.