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Emotion in the Digital Age examines how emotion is understood, researched and experienced in relation to practices of digitisation and datafication said to constitute a digital age. The overarching concern of the book is with how emotion operates in, through, and with digital technologies. The digital landscape is vast, and as such, the authors focus on four key areas of digital practice: artificial intelligence, social media, mental health, and surveillance. Interrogating each area shows how emotion is commodified, symbolised, shared and experienced, and as such operates in multiple dimensions. This includes tracing the emotional impact of early mass media (e.g. cinema) through to efforts to programme AI agents with skills in emotional communication (e.g. mental health chatbots). This timely study offers theoretical, empirical and practical insight regarding the ways that digitisation is changing knowledge and experience of emotion and affective life. Crucially, this involves both the multiple versions of digital technologies designed to engage with emotion (e.g. emotional-AI) through to the broader emotional impact of living in digitally saturated environments. The authors argue that this constitutes a psycho-social way of being in which digital technologies and emotion operate as key dimensions of the ways we simultaneously relate to ourselves as individual subjects and to others as part of collectives. As such, Emotion in the Digital Age will prove important reading for students and researchers in emotion studies, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and related fields.
List of contents
1. Emotion in the Digital Age 2. The History and Emergence of Emotion-Technology Relations 3. Artificial Intelligence and Emotion 4. Social Media and Emotion 5. Digital Mental Health 6. Surveillance and Emotion 7. Digital Futures and Emotion
About the author
Darren Ellis is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of East London, UK, and co-author of
Social Psychology of Emotion.
Ian Tucker is Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of East London, UK, and co-author of
Social Psychology of Emotion.
Summary
This book explores the ways in which emotion is understood, researched and experienced through digital technologies. With attention to questions what impact digitized emotion has on our subjectivity and everyday life, it will appeal to scholars of emotion studies, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and related fields.
