Understanding Networked Affect in Online Appeals for Giving in Thailand

This thesis explores networked affect in online charity appeals, focusing on the nature and implications of digital representations of suffering. It contributes to theories of affect and emotion, charity and philanthropy, and cultural and media studies. Specifically, it introduces a transdisciplinary approach to explore the affective mediation of proximal suffering from a transnational perspective, with an empirical focus on South East Asian Buddhist culture. Using as a case study the Thai celebrity philanthropist Bhin Bunluerit's Facebook fan page and its regular emotional appeals for fundraising, the thesis is empirically grounded in the context of Thailand and makes use of digital ethnography to gather information and affective material to understand how digital media users engage with and respond to these appeals and the wider cultural and socio-political implications of this engagement. I develop an analytical framework that identifies key features of networked affect - including multiplicity, accessibility, virtual collectivity, and indexicality - to bring into critical conversation three key academic areas: celebrity philanthropy, the mediation of suffering, and the logics of gift-giving. The thesis argues that the modes of affect operating within Thai online charity appeals and public responses to them reinforce social hierarchies and asymmetrical power relations between philanthropic individuals and beneficiaries, which are embodied within Thai Buddhist belief systems and reproduced by insufficient welfare governance and support structures.

The empirical analysis suggests that the Buddhist ideology of power legitimises and sacralises Bunluerit's celebrity philanthropist and hero status while supporting the operation of the patron-client-based affective bond of gratitude (khun) and punitive correction (dej) that allows him to exercise ideological influence over beneficiaries and fans. Bunluerit regularly mobilises graphic representations of vulnerability and suffering to induce songsarn, a Thai form of compassion often associated with Buddhist giving (dāna), to elicit donations through the commodification of pain. Beneficiaries consequently become 'abject subjects' within ongoing processes of inclusion through exclusion that shore up the sovereignty of the Thai state. That is, beneficiaries who have been epistemically excluded from the state through being culturally stigmatised as ngoa, joan, jeb (stupid, poor, sickly), are, through Bunluerit's charity, brought back into the affective space of the nation in ways that nonetheless underscore the capacity of celebrity philanthropy to adjudicate the boundary of what it is to be Thai. The digitally mediated dāna which Bunluerit's fan page facilitates is, I argue, a 'transaction of compassion' underpinned by patron-client reciprocity. These relations of reciprocity are enacted by khun, wherein beneficiaries (clients) offer visual imagery of their extreme vulnerability, which symbolises their submission to donors' (patrons') power in order to receive the gift of their donation. Donors, in turn, benefit from their digital dāna through accumulating merit - a supernatural force believed to produce positive consequences in this and the next life - while also experiencing the self-serving joy of giving, which can pass for a real contribution to beneficiaries' well-being in ways that elide the more complex factors that reproduce social suffering and inequality in Thailand.

By examining the affective dynamics of Thai online giving and celebrity philanthropy, the thesis enriches and extends Euro-North American-centric theories of affect, charity, gift-giving, and the representation of suffering. It underscores how digitally mediated giving in South East Asia comprises complex entanglements of the supernatural, patron-client culture, normalised depictions of embodied vulnerability, class-stratified accounts of Buddhist merit-making, and affective dynamics that reinforce submission to cultural and religious authority.