Ian Tucker – författare

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.

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.

This is the first book to look exclusively from at the use of MHapps from an applied psychosocial perspective. Much of the academic literature on MHapps in psychology focuses on the clinical efficacy of using apps (e.g., depression reduction as result of using a certain app) and will typically report on the use of randomised controlled trials (or a similar method) to illustrate the use of apps as a tool for improving a psychological condition. Therefore, the main benefit of this book is that it recognises the impact of apps from a social perspective and will aim to show how everyday forms of distress are embedded in the use of these apps and the broader set of relations that constitute people’s everyday lives. The content of this book will identify how an applied social perspective can offer insight into the power of apps to shape our sense of ourselves and of others. This book will be of use to educators and students in psychology, sociology, health studies, media studies andcultural studies.