#memeafectivity or notes on caring in expanded online space-time

Looking at how we currently relate to each other through the logic and tools offered by digital platforms such as WhatsApp and Instagram, this text reflects on how we are managing personal interactions. We are increasingly working with environments of sociability that are more and more intertwined between the online and the offline, and we are faced with the shortcoming of not being able to transfer the affective treatment in face-to-face relationships to interactions on social networks. These new relationships are woven in environments of instant attention in which we are accessible without limits because we spend more time connected than disconnected. Here we experience unmanageable excesses in terms of managing the time we spend socialising, where we must also question how to show affection and/or care online, where the exhaustion generated by exposure to these factors affects the way we interact. By looking at strategies or how we (care for) ourselves and show affection on digital platforms, I will propose the term memeaffectivity to define an intuitive way of using digital images as an alternative to manage expanded online sociability in an expanded connected time. Thus, memes are little visual pills that can act as a possible solution to attending to emotional networks online, or as an effective placebo that calm and reassure us in the face of the vertigo of managing our lives and time in an environment that increasingly absorbs us and demands us to be on/with connection.