Description
Book SynopsisFrom the virulence of fake news to the rise of psychographic profiling, emotion has become ascendant. The new frontier of capitalization is not outward, but inward—the inner life of affect and emotion, desire and disposition. This book lays that new reality out with a series of close case studies.
A new set of technologies are emerging, from facial coding to affective computing, that attempt to render the emotional into the machine-readable. At the same time, social media and smart home devices are becoming empathic, attempting to draw out our affective participation and elicit our emotional expression. In these encounters with the medial and the technical, the emotional is remade.
Combining a close analysis of contemporary technologies such as Affectiva, Facebook, and
Alexa with critical media theory, Logic of Feeling: Technology’s Quest to Capitalize Emotion examines how the quest to operationalize this inner life begins to reconfigure feeling itself.
Table of Contents1. The Ascendancy of Emotion
Emotional Content
Emotional Decisions
Emotional Computing
2. Capturing Emotion: Affectiva and Facial Coding
From Darwin to Ekman
Basic Emotions and the Revenge of Empiricism
Affectiva and Optimizing for Emotion
A Future of Facial Calibration
3. Eliciting Emotion: Facebook and the Injunction to Share
Anxious Pleasures
Addiction by Design
Making Emotion Count
4. Emulating Emotion: Alexa and Friendly Power
From Algorithmic to Affective
Turning to Face Alexa
5. Steering Emotion: Cambridge Analytica and Psychopolitics
Kosinski and the Intimate Like
Crawling into the Skin of the Consumer
From Demographics to Psychographics
Conclusion
