Emotion in the Digital Age: Technologies, Data and Psychosocial Life

Emotion in the Digital Age explores how emotion is understood, researched, and experienced in the digital age, focusing on four key areas: artificial intelligence, social media, mental health, and surveillance. It argues that digitization is changing knowledge and experience of emotion and affective life, constituting a psycho-social way of being in which digital technologies and emotion operate as key dimensions of our relationships with ourselves and others.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 142 pages
Publication date: 29 April 2022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Emotion in the Digital Age delves into the intricate understanding, exploration, and experiences of emotion in the context of the digital age, characterized by digitization and datafication. The central focus of the book revolves around the ways in which emotion operates within, through, and alongside digital technologies. Given the vast expanse of the digital landscape, the authors narrow their attention to four key areas of digital practice: artificial intelligence, social media, mental health, and surveillance. Through a comprehensive interrogation of each of these areas, the book reveals how emotion is commodified, symbolized, shared, and experienced across multiple dimensions. This includes tracing the emotional impact of early mass media, such as cinema, and exploring how efforts are being made to program AI agents with emotional communication skills, such as mental health chatbots. This timely study provides valuable theoretical, empirical, and practical insights into the ways in which digitization is reshaping our knowledge and experiences of emotion and affective life. Crucially, it encompasses both the diverse range of digital technologies designed to engage with emotion, such as emotional-AI, and the broader emotional implications of living in digitally saturated environments. The authors argue that this constitutes a psycho-social way of being, where digital technologies and emotion play pivotal roles in shaping our relationships with ourselves as individual subjects and with others as part of collective entities. As such, Emotion in the Digital Age holds significant importance for students and researchers in the fields of emotion studies, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and related disciplines.

Weight: 263g
Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367540098