Overview

Technology is conventionally viewed as dehumanizing. Yet, as Eva Illouz shows in this concise book, technology has become uniquely emotional, continuously tapping into and eliciting a great variety of emotions. From emojis, GIFs, and likes, to influencers, meditation apps, and virtual worlds, technology increasingly mimics and extends emotional life, turning feelings into quantifiable data and yielding extraordinary profits. Techno-capitalism, Illouz argues, no longer mines the soil, but extracts value from the self and subjectivity, transforming emotional energy into capital. This machinic intimacy between humans and technology integrates economy, culture, and psychology into one single matrix, making emotions into the new economic pipelines of techno-capitalism. The emotionalization of technology has profound effects: the loss of experience, loneliness crowded with vicarious interactions and leisure, and the replacement of reality by the performance of authenticity. Through a variety of examples, Illouz explores the mechanisms through which the emotional self has become the main economic resource of capitalism, a world where our feelings pass through machines and are manufactured, measured, and sold by them.

Full Product Details

9781509575190

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Emotional Technologies is like an amuse-bouche of critical analysis, a brief and rewarding explosion of powerful insight into the bewilderingly fast growth of sentiment mined for gold. With this comprehensive and even-handed account of how technologists elicit, shape, and harvest emotional material, Illouz outlines the hazards posed for democracy when authenticity replaces reality and embodied experience becomes instead a crowded loneliness. Without such an astute guide, we would surely stumble blindly into a perilous future of commodified feeling."" Allison Pugh, Johns Hopkins University

Author Information

Eva Illouz is Directrice d'Études at the EHESS in Paris. Jonas Ferdinand is a PhD candidate at Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg.

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