A Field Guide to Internet Emotion > 3.0 Atomize, or Bit-Sized Emotions

Tech emotionographer Pamela Pavliscak hosts an 8-month Interintellect Salon series while writing her new book #Feels: How Technology is Changing Our Emotional Life for the Better. 

Have you ever wondered why we feel compelled to note and name every new variation of sadness online? Or what you call that emotional hangover you can get after scrolling social media? Or how to explain that little leap of anxiety when the 3 dots appear as someone writes you a text message, and then mysteriously disappears? Then this is the salon series for you!

#Feels 3.0 > Atomize

In the third session of the series, we’ll focus on how technology has helped us to express and even feel new feelings. From recognizing cruel micro-aggressions to resurfacing ancient emotions like acedia (the mental sloth that accompanies physical inertia) to a fascination with far-flung foreign feeling words, people are slightly obsessed with uncovering new feelings.

Online, emotions are going atomic too. That little tingle you get from each Instagram heart, the cyberchondria caused by excessive Googling of a health concern, the latest variation of FOMO—new feelings seem to be emerging at an ever-faster pace. Experts say that emotional granularity, the ability to be precise about our feelings, is the key to greater emotional intelligence.

So, this salon will consider how our emotional life is trending toward hyper-specific emotions. And we’ll think about what it means for emotion tech to be stuck with just those five “universal” emotions for now. Be prepared to share new feelings spotted in the wild!

Pre-Salon Prep

Please read or watch the following, before the session:

• Watch Tiffany Watt Smith’s TEDx The History of Human Emotion
• Read Emotional Intelligence Needs a Rewrite by Lisa Feldman Barrett in Nautilus
• Learn how to apply the power of emotional granularity (based on Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book How Emotion is Made)
• Try out Tim Lomas’s Positive Lexicography or TU Delft’s Negative Emotion Typology or This Emotion Does Not Exist

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