1st Edition
Emotions Online Feelings and Affordances of Digital Media
Digital media have become deeply immersed in our lives, heightening both hopes and fears of their affordances. While the internet, mobile phones, and social media offer their users many options, they also engender concerns about their manipulations and intrusions. Emotions Online explores the visions that shape responses to media and the emotional regimes that govern people’s engagements with them.
This book critically examines evidence on the role of digital media in emotional life. Offering a sociological perspective and using ideas from science and technology studies and media studies, it explores:
• The dimensions and operations of the online emotional economy
• Growing concerns about online harms and abuse, especially to children
• ‘Deepfakes’ and other forms of image-based abuse
• The role of hope in shaping online behaviours
• ‘Digital well-being’ and its market
• COVID-19’s impacts on perceptions of digital media and Big Tech
• Growing challenges to centralised control of the internet, and the implications for future emotional life
The book breaks new ground in the sociological study of digital media and the emotions. It reveals the dynamics of online emotional regimes showing how deceptive designs and algorithm-driven technologies serve to attract and engage users. As it argues, digital media rely on the emotional labours of many people, including social media inf luencers and content moderators who make the internet seem smart. The book provides an invaluable overview of the evidence and debates on the role of digital media in emotional life and guidance for future research, policy, and action.
1. Digital media and the emotions
2. The online emotional economy
3. Emotional abuse online
4. Hope online
5. Digital wellbeing
6. Digital media and future emotional life
Biography
Alan Petersen is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University, Australia. His research interests include the sociology of health and medicine, science and technology studies, and gender studies. He is the author of Digital Health and Technological Promise: A Sociological Inquiry (2018), The Politics of Bioethics (2011), and The Body in Question: A Socio-Cultural Approach (2007), and co-author of The New Genetics and the Public’s Health (2001) and Poststructuralism, Citizenship and Social Policy (1999), among others.
"The exploitation of our emotions has become a central feature of our information environment, which has become more chaotic than ever. Alan Petersen's excellent new book, Emotions Online, is exactly what we need right now! It provides an evidence-informed and engaging tour through the complex topic and provides actionable path forward."
Timothy Caulfield, Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy, Professor in the Faculty of Law and the School of Public Health, and Research Director of the Health Law Institute, University of Alberta, Canada
"This excellent book, written by one of the leading researchers in the field, is a must read for anyone with an interest in how the online emotion economy works. It offers a highly compelling analysis of the complex relationship between emotions and the media, highlighting the vested interests that drive the digital ecosystem. It draws on a range of fascinating examples including the digital wellness industry and the emotional labour exploited online through social media influencers."
Alison Anderson, Professor in Sociology, University of Plymouth, UK
"This much needed volume reviews how our online lives have irrevocably changed during the course of the twenty first century. Our emotions provide the vital link between our embodied inner selves and the wider society, and their powerful manipulation through social media can be polarised between the extremes of good or evil. This incisive critique views those emotional processes and implications through a sociological lens to reveal the potential for the advancement of the social benefits of digital technology on the one hand, to the dangerous and destructive consequences of the other."
Gillian Bendelow. Professor Emerita in Sociology of Health and Medicine, University of Brighton, UK
"Alan Petersen’s Emotions Online is an invaluable exploration and appraisal of the entanglement of contemporary emotional life with digital media and their affective regimes, employed to attract and monetise attention. Analysing the novel forms of online misinformation, addiction and abuse, Petersen provides us with a powerful sociological approach to consider how emotional wellbeing in contemporary societies requires profound changes in the design and operation of digital media."
Benjamin Marent, Assistant Professor in Digital Technologies at Work, University of Sussex, UK
