Logic of Feeling

Technology's Quest to Capitalize Emotion

Luke Munn

From 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.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International

Pages: 128 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9½

978-1-5381-4835-8 • Hardback • December 2020 • $100.00 • (£77.00)

978-1-5381-4836-5 • eBook • December 2020 • $45.00 • (£35.00)

Subjects: Social Science / Media Studies, Social Science / Technology Studies

Logic of Feeling

Technology's Quest to Capitalize Emotion

Hardback

eBook

Summary

From 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.

Details

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International

Pages: 128 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9½

978-1-5381-4835-8 • Hardback • December 2020 • $100.00 • (£77.00)

978-1-5381-4836-5 • eBook • December 2020 • $45.00 • (£35.00)

Subjects: Social Science / Media Studies, Social Science / Technology Studies

Author

Luke Munn is a studio supervisor at Whitecliffe College of Art & Design and author of Ferocious Logics. His projects have been featured in theKunsten Museum of Modern Art, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Fold Gallery London, Causey Contemporary Brooklyn and the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum, with commissions from Aotearoa Digital Arts, and TERMINAL.

Table of Contents

1. 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

Logic of Feeling

Technology's Quest to Capitalize Emotion

Luke Munn

Logic of Feeling

Technology's Quest to Capitalize Emotion

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