Mediatisation of Emotional Life

Katarzyna Kopecka-Piech, Mateusz Sobiech, Katarzyna Kopecka-Piech, Mateusz Sobiech

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000589351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume brings together an international team of authors to investigate a wide range of issues concerning the fundamental role of media technologies in shaping contemporary emotional life. Chapters explore key aspects of the mediatisation of emotional life, feelings and interpersonal relations: love, intimacy, loneliness, friendship, family relations, erotic, sexual and romantic experiences.

The authors explain the key aspects of strong user–media relationships and human relationships based on media use and investigate problems such as the formation of identity based on social media, the role of communication applications and the effects of mobile and locative media on our relationships, as well as artificial intelligence, on our perception of our emotions. With a focus on new media, the book also draws on the scope of traditional media that express and shape emotions, taking into account the classic approaches to emotionality of messages from the perspective of film creators and recipients.

This cutting-edge collection will be of interest to scholars and students of media and communication studies, especially digital media and new technologies, psychology, pedagogy, sociology of everyday life and cultural studies.

Chapters 5 and 10 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Part I Conceptualisations Mediatisation of feelings, emotions and relationships

1 Mediatisation of emotional life Theories, concepts and approaches

Katarzyna Kopecka-Piech

DOI: 10.4324/9781003254287-3

Introduction

Today, emotions are linked to consumption and media, requiring reflexive analysis, response and management (Patulny et al., 2019). Emotionality and communication are closely intertwined. Starting from interpersonal communication, which is about emotions, based on emotions, builds emotions; through to group, organisational/institutional, mass and network communication. Emotions are a personal element of human life and a sociocultural element of the functioning of society. Therefore, no matter which channel, infrastructure or mediation tool we are dealing with, emotional, relational and sensory elements are present both in the message and in the structure of the medium.

The emotional sphere is a constant element of the media sphere and in the 21st century also the other way round: the media sphere interferes more and more strongly in the emotional life of a human being. While the beginnings of the mediation of emotions can be traced back to the emotionalisation of the media, when, for example, the press tried to convey the reported emotions in words or photos, the radio with sound and television with audiovisual content, the Internet has intensified the processes of mediatisation of the emotional sphere, in both the public and private spheres. As an interactive, multimodal and networked medium, it is not only a platform for transmitting, shaping and facilitating emotions, but is itself a space in relation to which we nourish our emotions and which learns and responds to our emotions.

We can have emotions in relation to each of the media technologies, also, or perhaps especially, to a traditional book or a record. However, interactive media, through their affordances, have led to a situation in which technology not only determines, through its properties, the way emotions are transmitted and built, but also initiates, sustains, models, weakens or strengthens relations between communicating parties, as well as with the medium itself. We are dealing with, for example, algorithmic social media. After all, the development of artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality and other ubiquitous media has resulted in emotional life being heavily technologised, with technology becoming “interested” in emotions, becoming “empathetic.” IT tools already enable the detection, modulation and simulation of emotions. It can be said that because of their commercial and political potential, technologies are orienting themselves towards emotions, the recognition and use of which constitutes a great deal of power.

Such a multi-layered and complex issue as the relationship between media and emotions can be studied in many ways: quantitatively and qualitatively, drawing on the achievements of psychology, linguistics, sociology, culture studies, computer science and also medicine. Not all approaches fall into the tradition of research on mediatisation, but it should be emphasised that the direction of development of this framework is evolving towards ever stronger computing and learning about datafication processes. Hence, in order to perceive the direction of development of mediatisation, we need to look at the sphere of media-emotional relations much more broadly than in the traditional sociocultural perspective: be it institutional, constructivist or technological-material.

This chapter provides an overview of the literature on the mediation and mediatisation of emotional life, feelings and interpersonal relationships. The analysis based on the literature review classifies approaches, perspectives and thematic areas within this research field. On the one hand, it underscores the main topics undertaken in the humanities (mainly on the cusp between media studies and psychology, but also cultural studies); on the other hand, it outlines interdisciplinary research areas bordering between communication studies and sociology or management and marketing studies. Focusing on the most recent publications (from 2015 to 2020), the chapter outlines the main research trends: for example, orientation towards social media, datafication, algorithmisation, applicatisation and platformisation. It provides a typology of research topics. These include studies on the expression of emotions in the media; the construction and creation of emotions by the media; building and maintaining interpersonal and para-social relations thanks to the media; and studies on relations with the media technologies and media services as such.

Media and emotions – methodological turns and main concepts, definitions and typologies

Methodological turns

The reorientation of research and scientific discourse towards emotions, feelings and affects is not new. It dates back a decade or even decades ago, when the humanities and social sciences were increasingly talking about an “affective turn” (Clough & Halley, 2007; Clough, 2008) and “emotional turn” (Lemmings & Brooks, 2014). The shift in emphasis, the focus on the emotional dimensions and aspects of human life, including creativity, activity and constructed collectivity has brought the development of new approaches, such as proposals for conceptualisations of “affective culture” (Hjorth & Arnold, 2013), “affective capitalism” (Karppi et al., 2016), “affective societies” (Slaby & Scheve, 2019), “emotional reflexivity” (Serrano-Puche & Rojas, 2019), and consequently the dynamic development of the field of “affect studies,” or “emotion research.”

One of the main distinctions on which these methodological turns are based is the separation of the social and cultural from the biological and neurobiological. However, many of the proposals omit a key aspect in the 21st century, namely the technological aspect. Recent research shows that reflection must be complemented by it. Technologies and media are not just a sociocultural creation. They are at the same time material and virtual, programmable, progressively more intelligent and ultimately autonomous, and above all deeply embedded in human life – on numerous levels of existence. Any emotional and affective methodological or conceptual turn, especially in media and communication studies that ignores the importance and nature of technology in the functioning of the modern human, does not seem complete.

Theories and definitions

The relationship between media and emotions is studied within different disciplines, paradigms and traditions. The topic can be found in psychology (including psychoanalysis), philosophy (especially phenomenology), cognitive science, cultural studies, sociology, as well as neuroscience and psychiatry.

There are many approaches and theories and thus definitions of the main concepts related to emotional life (Lünenborg & Maier, 2018). The highest degree of identification of different concepts with each other concerns: emotions, affects, feeling and moods. There is no complete agreement on the definition of each of these concepts, as they are conceived in a more or less individual or collective way depending on the theory and framing.

The key distinction between emotions runs along the divide: individual, personal, psychological versus collective, shared and social. Among the psychological theories of emotions, we distinguish: constructivist theories, appraisal theories, basic emotion theory and dimensional models. Among the concepts oriented towards social aspects, we can distinguish emotions as social objects (McCarthy, 2017) and “digital affect cultures” (Döveling et al., 2018; Giaxoglou & Döveling, 2018).

For the purposes of social media and communication research, it can be assumed that feelings should be considered as personal, emotions as social and affects as prepersonal states (Shouse, 2005). Affect is impersonal and reactive moving from emotions to feelings, the former we experience through the latter (Tan, 2017). While distinguishing the category of mood: moods unlike emotions are not directed towards something specific (Eder et al., 2019).

We must remember, however, that the aforementioned concepts do not exhaust the catalogue of phenomena falling within the area of broadly understood emotional life, especially mediated life. In the discussed context, sensations, relationships and empathy are also very often studied. The research takes up very specific topics, problems and issues. In the case of research into the mediated dimension of life, they concern in particular bonding, excitement, anxiety, amusement, sadness, contentment, sentiments, hedonism, eudaimonia, happiness, fear, enjoyment, anger, aggression, guilt, hope, humour, expression, regulation, recovery, vitality, intimacy and many others.

Typologies

What makes up the mediated emotional life of the modern human? On the one hand, it is their personal, intimate, individual sensations, feelings, emotions and relationships that have been mediated by the media: either as a result of representation (by press, radio, film, television, video, photo, podcast, etc.) or as a result of interaction (by digital media, including social media) – in contact both with another person and with a device. On the other hand, these are all socially and culturally shared emotional worlds: perceived, reproduced by the user, as well as co-created by the user.

The areas, spheres and perspectives of research on the relationship between media and emotions are typologised differently. Jens Eder et al. (2019) focusing on film studies, believe that the relationship between media and emotions can be grouped into four areas: emotion representation, emotion elicitation, emotion practice and emotion culture. Katrin Döveling et al. (2010) distinguish four domains: ontological status of emotion, elicitation of emotion, emotion expression and social and cultural construction of emotion. Robin L. Nabi (2016) distinguishes three approaches within media effects research: emotion as a predictor of media selection, an outcome of media exposure and a mediator of other psychological and behavioural outcomes resulting from media exposure. The literature review allows proposals for new typologies to be formulated, reflecting both the levels of research, research perspectives and specific research areas.

Emotions can be both the content of media messages (e.g. when television shows hatred) and interpersonal communication (e.g. when we share our everyday experiences through a messenger), an element of media structure (e.g. when one of the functionalities of social media is e.g. the “like” button) and an analysis tool thanks to which analysts know more about their recipients, clients and voters (e.g. thanks to sentiment analysis, facial recognition and other artificial intelligence tools). With the development of digital media, media technologies have ceased to be just tools for reflecting and building emotions. Whatever the purpose of this process, they have become tools for exploring human emotions: recognising, analysing and consequently applying the knowledge gained in practice to manipulate the individual and society.

Few of the research approaches, theories and typologies are applicable in the field of mediatisation studies. This framework is narrower than general media-emotional relations research, which can be studied in numerous ways – sometimes contradictory (such as psychological versus sociocultural effects of media use on children’s emotional life). In order to answer the question of how the field of research on the mediatisation of emotional life is shaped, it should be remembered that mediatisation is a two-way process of mutual influence and transformation of the media sphere and other spheres of life, in this case the emotional sphere. And as postulated by theorists, it should not be studied mediocentrically (Hepp, 2010). If we look at the discussed area of research, we can see that such a study should not be emotiocentric either. It cannot constitute an instrumental analysis of emotionality in isolation from technological conditions. It should not omit the analysis of the properties of media technologies in favour of a purely psychological interpretation of phenomena. The study of mediatisation should balance media and non-media elements; noticing mutual influences and nuancing contexts. How does the research on mediatisation of emotional life shape up against the background of the research on the broadly understood relationship between media and emotions?

Research on the current state of studies: approach and methodology

In order to check the current state of research in the field of the relationship between media and emotions, especially the mediatisation of emotional life, an analysis of the results of a search for scientific publications and an analysis of selected scientific publications was carried out. For this purpose, the Google Scholar search engine was used. Firstly, the search results of a narrower issue, that is, the mediatisation of emotions were analysed (“mediatization of emotion*” and “mediatisation of emotion*” keywords were used), over a longer period of time, that is, from 2000 to 2020. Secondly, the search results of publications from 2015 to 2020 having the two broader terms “media” and “emotion” in the title of the publication were analysed (“media and emotion*” keyword was used). The first round yielded 38 search results (25 for “mediatization” and 13 for “mediatisation”); the second round yielded: 295 results. The results were grouped thematically based on the key terms in the titles of the publications in order to identify the main topic of the research. On the basis of the analysis of the titles of 333 total search results, 129 subcategories of topics were identified, which formed five general categories.

A separate analysis of the blurbs and table of contents of key book publications from 2010 to 2020 and other scientific publications in the area, mainly journal articles from 2015 to 2020, for the analysed area was also carried out.

Then, a meta-analysis of abstracts of 50 selected scientific publications from 2000 to 2020, representing the five specified general categories, and five selected recent synthetic and revi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Conceptualisations: mediatisation of feelings, emotions and relationships
• Part II Analysis: challenges caused by mediation to relationships
• Part III Explorations: key aspect of emotional lives with media
• Name index
• Subject index