Note:  This  chapter  is  forthcoming  in   Networked  Affect  (2013)Eds.  Ken  Hillis  and
Sussanah  Paasonen,  MIT  Press.
CHAPTER  PROPOSAL:
Affect  and  the  Old  Spice  Guy:
A  Tale  of  Tactility  and  Distraction
Theresa  Senft
New  York  University
Terri.senft@nyu.edu
The  most  successful  social  media  advertising  campaign  to  date  is  Isaiah  Mustapha’s   performance  as  the  Old  Spice  Guy.  Drawing  on  contemporary  African  American   scholarship  in  performance,  literary,  and  film  theory,  this  chapter  is  an  attempt  to   reverse-­‐engineer  the  affective  mechanics  of  the  wildly  popular  campaign  and  the   level  of  viral  popularity  that  Mustafa  has  achieved.  Long  ago,  Walter  Benjamin   argued  that  the  modern  media  consumer  is  driven  by  two  competing  desires.  On  the   one  hand,  she  desires  tactility,  closeness,  authenticity.  On  the  other,  she  feels  pushed   in  the  direction  of  distraction,  novelty,  multiplicity.  I  use  Benjamin’s  thoughts  in  this   chapter  to  think  through  the  rise  and  fall  of  the  Old  Spice  Guy  online  campaign   online.  I  intend  my  chapter  to  serve  as  a  blueprint  or  “how  to”  guide  for  others   trying  to  think  about  who  wins  and  who  loses  when  social  media’s  capacity  to  touch   and  distract  is  allowed  to  flourish  without  critical  analysis  and  intervention.
My  study  of  the  Old  Spice  Guy  is  further  informed  by  my  concept  of  “the  grab.”  I  have   developed  the  concept  because  of  grab’s  relation  to  tactility:  grab  means  to  grasp,  to   seize,  to  capture  and  touch.  As  a  concept,  grabbing  has  overtly  political  and  affective   dimensions:  consider  the  expression  “screen  grab,”  in  which  an  image,  sound,  or  line   of  text  is  excised  out  its  original  context  and  often  sent  traveling  the  internet,   spinning  into  what  danah  boyd  calls  the  super-­‐public  sphere,  beyond  geography,   intention,  and  even  time.  Grabbing  has  sexual  dimensions,  and  throughout  history   certain  bodies  have  been  the  grabbers;  others  grabbed.  Isaiah  Mustapha’s   remarkable  performance,  coupled  to  the  perceived  immediacy  and  presence   afforded  by  social  media,  encouraged  the  sense  that  consumers  could  “reach  out  and   grab”  him,  thereby  acquiring  without  seeming  consequence  a  piece  of  his  aura  as  a   handsome,  funny  and  African  American  man  who  addresses  a  predominantly  white   female  buying  public.
It  is  not  possible,  however,  to  really  possess  Mustafa  or  any  other  viral  celebrity  in   this  way  and  the  Old  Spice  campaign  exemplifies  how  social  media  fuel  a  particular   form  of  affective  restlessness  always  in  need  of  requiting.  This  restlessness  is  built   into  social  media’s  architectures  and  I  liken  it  to  an  itch.  Late  capitalism  works  this   way  as  well,  creating  itches  and  selling  temporarily  soothing  “scratches,”  which,  I

conclude,  explains  the  recent  influx  of  celebrities  such  as  the  Old  Spice  Guy  and   branded  goods  such  as  Old  Spice  onto  social  media  sites  like  Twitter.