I think affective responses are partly socially constructed, as you suggest,
but also importantly (and I think that's the jist of what I was suggesting)
are emergent (your second point). This emergent quality is perhaps most
difficult to deal with for research. It has to do a lot also with the
"unique" moments of mediated action, that is, what is least easily predicted
from the affordances of cultural tools or from their histories of use. It is
also the way in Bakhtin's framework that words and other cultural symbols
become imbued with personal meanings (or in Bakhtin's terms, "tone.")
Bill Penuel
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