The present theoretical exploration constitutes a part of a larger doctoral research which seeks to analyze the role of emotion and affect in politics of dissent and the extent to which 'new media' technology impacts and/or reconfigures the dynamics of the two as well as of contemporary power relations. Specifically, the study seeks to critically assess the widely celebrated claims about the 'online' medium's democratic and liberating potential along with the role that has been assigned to emotion and affect in political activism 'on' and 'offline'. The research takes as its case study the Occupy movement as an example of political activism, which has been ignited by powerful emotions of indignation and shaped by 'online' 'mediascapes' operating as part of global cultural flows (Appadurai 1990). This exercise will permit to evaluate the possible consequences for the emotion-action dynamic that is so essential to political engagement. The question that is now being increasingly asked is how institutionalized powers appropriate the medium, thereby subverting its liberating potential. McLuhan in his day warned against the numbing effects of the media, while many contemporary academics and political commentators insist that it might be another form of "opium for the people" and a social control tool used to placate dissent by homogenizing and manipulating emotions, thought, and ultimately behaviour. Thus, the concepts that this study aims to theoretically scrutinize are 'online mediascapes,' ' political activism,' 'emotion' and the 'power dynamics of political engagement.' This analysis will draw mainly upon cultural-philosophical and media-theoretical perspectives, but also on sociological and critical perspectives. By following such a trajectory, it enables to grasp online mediascapes as well as emotions in their institutional and technological sense as 'moulding forces' of communicative action, thereby permitting to research them empirically as part of the mediatisation process.
