Introducing a more-than-quantitative approach to explore emerging structures of feeling in the everyday

Emotional Geographies has so much further to go in its analysis of social media data. It was recently estimated that more than 5 billion people in the world owned a smart device of some kind with 2,910 million active users of Facebook, 1478 million of Instagram, and 436 million of Twitter1, to name just a few of the most popular social media platforms.2 As you read this, you might have half an eye on one of these platforms, pausing to ‘like’ a message, with entanglements of digital devices, social media, images, tones and vibrations mediating how you engage with, and experience, it (Liu and Chen, 2022). These entanglements affectively shape our ‘more-than-real’ (McLean, 2020) worlds and it could be argued that our use of digital devices and social media platforms is generating an emerging, evolving, contemporary structure of feeling described by Williams (1977, p. 131) as ‘a particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or a period’.