This project is intended to analyze the role of emotions for the production of new forms of belonging and citizen mobilizations in the age of the internet. Rather than being caught in the "iron cage" of rationality (Weber), the modern world tends to become ever more dominated by mass affects exploding unexpectedly and spreading at the speed of electromagnetic impulses, to disappear as suddenly as they have appeared. Practices of citizenship seem to change during the last decades. The old types of political and civic engagement based on fidelity, discipline, self-limitation or ideological choice are gradually replaced by mobilizations triggered directly by emotions. Reality shows have become occasions to raise social questions; politicians address the feelings of the private person by personalized profiles, blogs and photos; social solidarity is generated not by arguments, but by compassion produced by images of suffering and is expressed impulsively through SMS-gifts. Besides other factors like the ascent of the consumer and the fragmentation of contemporary societies, it is the role of the new media constellation that needs to be taken into consideration in order to understand the change. A new aspect of the contemporary populism is the volatility of indignation, for the new media constellation privileges short-term concerns about the immediate effects on the politician's rating (monitored in real time) to long-term strategies of decency and public prestige. In such a perspective, populism is not a marginal anti-systemic position, but characterizes the mainstream of Bulgarian (but also Polish, Italian, Romanian...) politics.