In two recent volumes — "Through the Prism of Fear: Studying the Construction of Fear in the Media Sphere" (forthcoming) and "The Power of Emotions: On the Affective Constitution of Political Struggles" — semioticians Andreas Ventsel, Merit Maran and Mari-Liis Madisson argue that the media is not a neutral mirror, but an emotional engine that fuels political conflict.

• We live in a time when fear is constantly discussed and often seen as a key factor in shaping events. At the same time, people are expected to justify their fear as rational, legitimate and appropriate.
• The spread of fear in culture signals a crisis of meaning — a collapse of previous interpretive frameworks that leaves society in a state of uncertainty and ambiguity.
• Emotions such as anger, fear, love and pride are not byproducts of politics but its very foundation.
• In affective securitization, the focus of democratic processes shifts away from managing fears toward emotional polarization where imagined threats — not shared visions — shape the future.
• Resisting fear, the researchers say, requires a culture capable of tolerating uncertainty and ambivalence.

The title of your new collection refers to a "prism of fear" through which to analyze today's media environment. What exactly is the media sphere and why is fear the main prism that helps us understand how this environment functions? Are we currently living in a distinct culture of fear?

Mari-Liis Madisson: Let's think of the media sphere as a contemporary cultural space where meaning is created, transmitted and preserved — one shaped by media processes. These processes include, on one hand, the production of news and social media content and, on the other, the circulation of meaningful stories and impactful audiovisual imagery, along with the algorithmic and platform-driven targeting of content. All of these factors interact to produce interpretation.

The media sphere is where public debates unfold, where collective emotions take shape and where aesthetic experiences emerge — often inseparable from one another. It also encompasses personal communication practices. Together, all of this forms the modern experience of what it means to be human.

While writing the foreword to the book, I kept returning to something internet researcher Sonia Livingstone said back in the late 2000s: contemporary society cannot be understood without understanding the logic of media. Media is now so deeply intertwined with society that the two can no longer be viewed as separate systems. In today's world, where most personal and public communication, as well as meaning-making, happens via screens, it has become clear that media culture and society constantly shape each other through mutual interaction.

We're not saying that media influences everything — we're not media determinists — but it is a major force that deserves close attention.

As for the theme of the volume, we were guided by the realization that while a culture of fear is not new, what is new is the way it is mediated today. There's something fundamentally different about how fear is conveyed now.

Today's media environment makes fear especially visible and shareable. We no longer experience fear solely through direct threats. More often, it comes to us as a mediated stream, a fusion of various signals crafted from a specific perspective, shaped by certain moods and emotions. Layered on top of these are metacommentaries — comments on the comments and on the shared emotions themselves — which often heighten uncertainty and dramatize the sense of threat.

We're not claiming to live in a time of unprecedented fears, but rather in a time when fear has become a key mode of communication. The media environment has become an "emotion machine" that produces and amplifies feelings. These emotions give rise to meaning and a sense of belonging. At the same time, they can also cause fatigue and deepen mistrust.

Finally, regarding the prism of fear, it's important to understand that media doesn't just produce information; it also produces experience. The prism of fear highlights this dual role. Alongside information, media creates emotional frameworks that shape how people perceive and make sense of what feels threatened or worth protecting.

It's often assumed that the media merely reflects fears already present in society. But your collection suggests that the media's role is much more active — it not only transmits fear but also shapes and amplifies it. How does this mechanism work and what kinds of techniques are used?

Merit Maran: One reason is that the media sphere largely operates according to what's known as the attention economy. Fear is one of the most effective ways to capture attention. What causes anxiety or startles us tends to make us click and share.

Some of the most common techniques include clickbait headlines, overdramatizing conflict, portraying someone else or even a constructed "other" as a threat or culprit, using emotionally charged language and making exaggerated moral judgments.

In today's media sphere, visual and audiovisual content plays a central role. Images and video are far more effective at eliciting emotion than text alone. This makes fear spread faster. The emotion someone feels when watching a frightening video clip can be so intense that they hit the share button before they've had a chance to analyze what they just saw rationally. That makes the spread much more immediate.

When it comes to how fear spreads on social media, algorithms are key. They track our past reactions. Today's platforms don't just measure what we click on or share — they also monitor how long we pause on a particular piece of content. This means users are gradually losing agency — the ability to consciously choose what kind of content they want to engage with. We're being manipulated through our immediate reactions into consuming information that we often can't fully control.

This kind of targeted content delivery means every user gets a personalized version of fear. Within these information bubbles, fear not only spreads — it multiplies and reproduces the very things people react to.

As Mari-Liis previously painted a picture of the complexity of the media sphere, it's also important to highlight that there are parts of this landscape actively working against the spread of fear. The picture is complex and diverse. So, it would be wrong to say the entire media environment follows a single trend or is solely focused on fueling fear.

One of the authors in your collection uses the striking metaphor of a "bogeyman" to describe how fears are projected onto "the other." How are such fears — targeted, for example, at migrants or political opponents — created and amplified in the digital sphere and how does this help construct the "us vs. them" divide?

Merit Maran: It's important to emphasize that the mechanism of creating a "bogeyman" is nothing new in culture. Historically, collective fear has often evolved from a diffuse sense of anxiety into the image of a concrete enemy. Juri Lotman, for instance, wrote about this in the context of early modern witch hunts. What's new in the digital media environment is the scale and speed of that spread.

Narratives about different types of "bogeymen" usually start circulating during times when the world feels unstable or overly complex. This may be triggered by major social changes that can no longer be interpreted using familiar frameworks. In such moments, framing "the other" or "the outsider" as a threat offers a sense of clarity — a simple explanation for why things feel wrong. It also fosters a sense of belonging and provides an illusion of stability. Unfortunately, this mechanism of stabilization comes at a high cost. Fear is often projected onto social minorities, such as migrants, or onto ideological opponents.

In the digital sphere, these fears are typically amplified through simplified and highly emotional narratives. What matters most is that the message spreads across multiple channels, is repeated in various formats and moves quickly. No arguments are needed, emotional impact is enough.

This mechanism becomes especially powerful in the digital information space, where content spreads as small, decontextualized fragments — memes, images, videos and slogans. When such fragments are shared and commented on thousands of times and saturate social media, they begin to take on a life of their own and start to feel real. This is how "bogeymen" are constructed — figures onto which collective anxiety and fear can be projected.

We often fear the dangerous impact of conspiracy theories, yet the theories themselves are often driven by deep fears about the future or about hidden powers. Do both the criticism of conspiracy theories and the theories themselves actually rely on similar fear-inducing mechanisms?

Mari-Liis Madisson: The short answer is — yes, they do. Both our own research and that of many European colleagues shows that conspiracy theories are extremely popular today, but also heavily stigmatized. The discourse surrounding them has become highly polarized. Both conspiracy theories and their criticism express strong fears and reflect the belief that manipulating people through fear is deeply dangerous.

Conspiracy theories warn of hidden powers and secret control. Criticism, in turn, warns that conspiracy theories and misinformation are dangerous, that they deceive people, dull their critical thinking and fracture society. Fear is the driving force behind both discourses.

On one hand, this is part of the explanation for why people might abandon critical thinking or lose a sense of agency over their own lives. It's the emotional appeal of fear that seems to block rational thinking and paralyze people.

On the other hand, the rhetorical strategies used by both sides are often very similar. For example, the idea of brainwashing appears in both conspiracy narratives and their criticism. This might seem surprising, but even social media groups critical of conspiracy theorists often describe how "woo-woo merchants" go around "brainwashing" people who are struggling in life.

In both cases, complex reality is simplified into a clear-cut binary — a stark "us vs. them." At the same time, we see discursive regulation at play — setting boundaries around which fears are considered legitimate and which are not. A socially aware person is expected to feel the "right" kind of fear, while "wrong" fears are labeled irrational or ridiculous.

This leads to a paradox. We live in a time when fear is constantly talked about and seen as a key factor behind many social phenomena. Yet, people are continually expected to prove that the fear they feel is valid, rational and legitimate. Both conspiracy theorists and their critics use fear not only to express threats, but also to marginalize or discredit others' perceptions and to justify their own moral positions.

Technology, especially social media and artificial intelligence, has given rise to new kinds of fears. How has digital communication changed the speed and nature of how fear spreads? Can we speak of "contagious fear"?

Andreas Ventsel: As my colleagues have emphasized, media — especially social media — is not a neutral or passive environment when it comes to mediating fear. Rather, it acts as an active backdrop that produces and amplifies fear. Merit pointed to the click-based economy and Mari-Liis highlighted conflict-driven narratives and negative framing. All of these factors shape how we respond to messages.

In the context of social media, the platforms' socio-technical affordances support new forms of interaction that didn't exist before — for example, rapid search capabilities, the ease of copying and distributing information and increased interactivity. These features make our behavioral patterns on social media more instinctive and faster. As a result, emotionally charged and fear-inducing keywords are often used tactically to draw attention to certain issues and to motivate people to react or mobilize socially.

In addition, risks and threats have shifted from local to global. Climate change, terrorism, cyberattacks and pandemics can emerge anywhere in the world. News and stories about them spread globally in real time. Media communication not only conveys these threats but also amplifies them. Every new concern becomes a source of advertising revenue or political capital. Put more elegantly: fear has become a commodity, capitalized on by both media companies and political forces.

Another important factor is that welfare societies have grown used to stability and safety. Crises, however, have made these societies significantly more sensitive. Even the slightest tremor in the social fabric can trigger an outsized response, even when the objective threat is minimal. In such an environment, fear spreads quickly and contagiously because society itself has become more receptive to it.

Political philosopher Judith Shklar spoke of "liberalism of fear," the idea that the state's primary role is to protect citizens from fear. Your new book examines how emotions, including fear, are used in political power struggles, such as through affective securitization. What does it say about our democracy that generating fear has become a constitutive part of power itself?

Andreas Ventsel: Fear has long been used in political communication as a tool for mobilization. However, the conditions we've discussed, especially social media and digital communication, have transformed fear from a mere instrument into an objective in itself, something that is deliberately created and shaped.

The concept of securitization helps us understand this process. Securitization means framing certain issues, like migration, climate change or artificial intelligence, as threats to the entire nation, state or societal values. Put simply, a threat scenario is drawn around the question: "What will happen if we don't act now?" When such threat narratives become emotionally charged, we enter the realm of affective securitization. This justifies implementing extraordinary or unusually harsh political measures to "neutralize" the threat — actions that might otherwise be difficult to legitimize.

The problem arises when citizens are mobilized not through rational debate and consensus-building, but through fear that is strategically constructed for that very purpose. This makes the political space more unpredictable and less open to diverse perspectives. In effect, fear and polarization become central to political communication and mobilization.

This process weakens democracy. In affective securitization, the democratic focus shifts away from reducing fear and building participatory cohesion, toward emotional polarization where deliberation is replaced by reactive "for or against" positions. The future is no longer shaped through a shared vision but through imagined threats.

Media theorist Zizi Papacharissi talks about "affective publics" — communities that form on social media around shared emotions, such as fear. To what extent are today's fear-driven discourses actually designed to create these rapidly mobilized, emotionally charged digital communities, rather than to foster genuine debate?

Andreas Ventsel: It's fair to say that certain fears in digital communication are purposefully designed, shaped algorithmically and through aesthetic choices, such as visuals and keywords. Emotion-driven recommendation models are built to guide users' attention and intensify affective resonance. For example, we see the use of dark and high-contrast color schemes, threatening imagery or apocalyptic visual styles.

Keywords like crisis, threat, attack or conspiracy also trigger emotional associations in search engines and platform algorithms. AI-based systems learn from users' emotional and behavioral patterns, such as which posts cause anxiety, how quickly we scroll through content or how we react. Fear, then, becomes not only a social experience but also an optimizable affect — something that can be shaped and monetized.

Political communities on social media often form precisely around these affective reactions. These digitally mediated communities are sometimes referred to as affective publics or even hashtag publics. What characterizes them is their fleeting, unstable nature and their foundation in strong emotional impulses. They don't emerge through deep, reasoned deliberation, but are triggered by immediate affective responses to external events.

Mari-Liis Madisson: When we talk about algorithms and affect, or algorithms and fear, we're not suggesting that algorithms create fear directly. Rather, they amplify a certain tone, making anxious, dramatic or shocking content more visible than calm, neutral messages.

A humanities-based, qualitative approach to studying affect helps us understand that it's not just the content of a message that matters, but how it's delivered. Increasingly, we're seeing the rise of expressive forms and outbursts that reflect shared experience — people publicly reacting to social change. Whereas emotional sharing used to occur mainly within close-knit circles, through facial expressions or gestures, it now unfolds en masse in digital spaces.

Scholars are also paying more attention to repetition. We're noticing the rhythms and recurring motifs that emerge in information flows. It's no longer just about coherent, logically structured arguments that are easy to deconstruct. Alongside that, the collective experience of emotion has become more visible and more influential than ever in today's media environment.

According to the Copenhagen School's theory of securitization, something becomes a threat through the act of speaking about it as such. In your new book, you expand on the concept of affective securitization, analyzing narratives like those used by Putin. How does bringing emotion into the securitization process change it? And how consciously do political actors use this affective dimension to construct threats and mobilize the public?

Andreas Ventsel: As mentioned earlier, securitization strategies are future-oriented. They construct a scenario of threat — what might happen if we don't act. The challenge, of course, is that the future is uncertain. To make this imagined future threat more tangible, actors often draw on fears and traumas embedded in collective cultural memory, using familiar narratives and tropes to give form to the unknown. This helps "domesticate" the unfamiliar and express it in emotionally resonant ways.

In the current context of the war in Ukraine, for example, Putin has managed — at least for his domestic audience — to present the conflict as a fight against fascism, portraying Ukraine as a Nazi state. This narrative strongly invokes the memory of World War II victory, which remains deeply central in Russian national identity. Nearly every person in Russia has some personal or familial connection to that event, through relatives who fought or died in the Red Army. If Western countries are then portrayed as dismissive or disrespectful of that legacy, it becomes more than just a historical dispute — it's framed as an attack on individual identity, on deeply personal memories and values.

We saw a similar form of affective securitization in Estonia during the 2022 debate over the removal of Soviet monuments. Much of the discussion revolved around the emotional pain these monuments caused. And certainly, for many people, especially those who lived through the Soviet regime, such monuments evoke a strong emotional response. But it was also clear that another purpose of the debate was to draw sharper political dividing lines — to radicalize the "us vs. them" dynamic. The main objective wasn't necessarily to resolve a problem, but to signal and reinforce political positions.

Of course, we have to understand politicians — they need to justify their stances and rally attention and support to implement their agendas. Affective securitization is a very effective tool for that. But therein lies the danger: when the creation of fear and the escalation of opposition become goals in themselves, political discourse can end up deepening, rather than solving, real societal problems.

Fear of Soviet monuments, for instance, isn't necessarily the root of the problem — it's more a symptom. If we focus only on the symptom, simplified as "no monument, no problem," then we risk ignoring the deeper traumas and divisions that still run through society.

Your books are deeply rooted in semiotics and the legacy of Juri Lotman. In your new volume, you also bring in a clear cultural-psychological perspective. What does a semiotic approach contribute to understanding fear and other political emotions? And how do semiotics and cultural psychology complement each other in analyzing the affective dynamics of politics?

Andreas Ventsel: Cultural psychology, especially Jaan Valsiner's approach, is already deeply semiotic in nature. He builds his theoretical framework on Lotman's ideas. One of Valsiner's key insights is that cultural phenomena do not automatically trigger affective responses, because culture operates as a hierarchical system. Affective reactions are only elicited by phenomena that hold value within that hierarchy, and even then, only among people who recognize and accept that system of values.

What evokes a strong affective response in one person or group may mean nothing to another. This is precisely where semiotics and cultural psychology come together — they help explain which cultural signs, keywords or symbols generate emotional responses in a particular audience and why. This makes affective communication something we can analyze.

There are, of course, strands of affect studies that treat affect and cultural discourse as entirely separate domains. That makes it harder to examine affect using the analytical tools common in semiotics and cultural studies. But cultural psychology offers a different view: affect, culture and discourse are interconnected and mutually influential. That's why we felt this perspective was a perfect theoretical cornerstone for our volume "The Power of Emotions," which I co-edited with Peeter Selg at Tallinn University.

Merit Maran: While psychology tends to study fear as an emotion at the level of the individual and sociology examines it at the macro level of society, semiotics allows us to bring these two into dialogue. Our collection shows that fear is rarely just an inner emotional response or merely a social or discursive construction. Rather, it emerges in the constant interplay between these levels.

From a Lotmanian perspective, what's also interesting is the function of fear within cultural dynamics. The spread of fear can be seen as a crisis of meaning. When fear narratives begin to dominate a culture, it signals that the familiar world has changed so much that our existing models for making sense of it no longer apply. This creates an atmosphere of uncertainty and instability.

At such moments, culture is forced to reconfigure itself — find new ways of describing and interpreting reality. What we call "fear epidemics" point to a cultural tipping point, where the old explanatory frameworks have broken down. This is where the semiotic perspective becomes especially valuable, allowing us to see how shifts in meaning are unfolding within the larger structure of culture as a whole.

If fear is such a widespread and powerful tool in the media sphere, what can an ordinary media consumer do to resist it? How can we build individual and collective resilience against the manipulation of fear?

Mari-Liis Madisson: I like to think that resisting fear doesn't mean becoming numb, indifferent or ignorant. It starts with the ability to recognize how fear operates within ourselves, within small communities and in broader cultural contexts.

If we treat fear as something to be suppressed, hidden or overcome at all costs, we cut ourselves off from the opportunity to learn from it. But if we view fear differently — say, as a signal that a culture or interpretive community feels stuck and in need of a new narrative or interpretive language — then it becomes an invitation to face and listen to difficult emotions with courage.

So fear shouldn't be a source of shame. We should learn to listen to it, because it reflects the current mix of values and uncertainties in a society. Fear is part of human perception and part of the social sensorium. If we pretend it doesn't affect us, it ends up influencing us through the back door, shaping our attention, our attitudes toward other social groups, our vigilance and sometimes our hostility or detachment.

A more effective approach is to ask: Why does a particular topic or perceived threat resonate with me? Why does it provoke anxiety? There's a common assumption that a critically minded and media-literate person should consume media with a "cold head." But our view emphasizes that emotions are not a weakness. Critical thinking is essential, yes, but so is nuanced emotional reflection.

When we consider how stories and fragments consumed on screens steer our emotions, our awareness of the media consumption and production process becomes much more layered and complex.

Secondly, fear doesn't only affect "other" interpretive communities or people "on the other side" — whether they're conservatives, liberals, esotericists or science-minded rationalists. Often we depict those people as irrational, blinded by fear, while "reasonable" people are supposedly immune. In reality, everyone experiences fear — it just takes different forms.

When we abandon this patronizing "us vs. them" framing and the idea that some fears are legitimate while others are not, real dialogue becomes possible again. What we need is a bit more humility and respect for different ways of experiencing the world.

Third, resisting fear means cultivating a culture that can tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity. Andreas mentioned earlier how Second World War trauma narratives are mobilized. That kind of emotional mobilization is especially powerful when communities cannot tolerate ambiguity and demand black-and-white explanations. As an alternative, people try to create a "bogeyman" or scapegoat onto whom all problems can be projected. But this is not a sustainable path. We won't be saved by facts and rationality alone — but by our capacity to tolerate complexity.

How do we train this muscle for handling contradiction, ambiguity and unpredictability? Probably the best way is to engage with complex texts: watch quality films, read literature, experience performance art — works that don't depict the world in black and white. These kinds of experiences build cognitive and emotional flexibility.

Merit Maran: I fully agree with Mari-Liis — fear should not be dismissed. A good example from culture is the environmental crisis, which shows that fear and anxiety can play a powerful mobilizing role. Fear isn't always negative — it can motivate action toward vital societal goals.

The case of eco-anxiety shows how difficult it is to find balance. Fear can push us to act, but if it becomes all-encompassing, it can also paralyze us. That's why we must learn to listen to our fears. They can also guide us toward better, more meaningful goals.

Andreas Ventsel: Emotions — whether anger, fear, love or pride — are not by-products of politics; they are part of its very foundation. Political identities are rooted in values, not in mathematical calculations. Identity isn't about Estonia ranking fifth in GDP — that might be nice, but it doesn't create meaning or belonging. If we used economic rationality as our sole standard, we'd have no justification for preserving the Estonian language or culture. It's costly. And yet, it's in our constitution — we value it. That's emotional belonging.

When emotions, and especially fear, become the goal of political communities in themselves, rather than tools in service of a constructive vision, we lose the space for dialogue. The only goal becomes creating "the other side" and opposing it. But a positive program requires sitting at the same table and attempting to facilitate diverse perspectives.

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