Online emotions: a framework

ABSTRACT

The paper develops a philosophical account of emotions experienced and communicated on the internet, and, in particular, in the context of social media use. A growing body of research across disciplines has investigated the distinctive features of emotions in the digital age, and a key question in this regard concerns whether online emotions are the same kind of phenomena as those undergone offline. In this paper, I contribute to addressing this question by suggesting that the structure and characteristic features of internet-mediated emotions can be accounted for within the perspective of Peter Goldie’s narrative theory of emotion. To do so, I first offer a reconstruction of Goldie’s conception of emotions as complex, dynamic, episodic and structured phenomena. I then move to show how the experience of emotions on social media like Facebook displays the characteristics which are at the core of Goldie’s account, proceeding to suggest that this enables us to better understand some of the features of emotions undergone on the internet. More specifically, I argue that the intensity, persistence and contagiousness of some online emotions can be better understood if we adopt Goldie’s framework.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotions
• Peter Goldie
• online
• internet
• social media

Acknowledgments

Previous versions of this paper were presented at the following events: Social Ontology 2020 (The 12th Biennial Collective Intentionality Conference), the 2020 Annual Conference of the British Society for Phenomenology (BSP), and the EGENIS Seminar at the University of Exeter. The author is very grateful to the audiences of these events for their feedback. Some sections of this paper originated in the research the author carried out as an integral part of her PhD thesis during her studies at Durham University, and she is grateful for the academic support she could benefit from at the time. Her sincere thanks also go to an anonymous Reviewer for their helpful comments, and to James Miller for stimulating discussions and the encouragement to pursue this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the literature, different characterisations have been offered of the notion of ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’. Here, I use the latter (and related terms such as ‘affective experience’) to refer to a set of mental states – distinct from cognition – that have a distinct phenomenology: they are ‘felt’ states, in so far as they involve the presence of bodily feelings or feelings of other kinds. The term ‘emotion’, on the other hand, is used to designate a particular set of affects, namely those which have an intentional structure.

2 For example, as reported by Ofcom (2020, 4), ‘OTT communication, and particularly Instant Messaging, appears to have partially displaced traditional voice calls (mobile and landline)’.

3 As stated above, my analysis concerns primarily emotions experienced and communicated on social media. However, a range of platforms on the internet have features (e.g. the possibility to create a personalised profile or comment sections) which are similar to the ones offered by social networks, and allow for similar types of interaction. As such, while this paper cannot explore the applicability of my account to affectivity on the internet in general, it suggests that such an account may be well suited to shed light on various emotional phenomena occurring on the web.

4 In a recent article, Fredrik Svenaeus (2021) has drawn upon Goldie’s work in the context of the exploration of empathic processes taking place online. My approach and focus in the present study are different, in so far as I am concerned with the structure of online emotions and not with the nature of intersubjective understanding on the internet. However, as highlighted by Svenaeus’ analysis, there is an affective dimension to at least certain forms of empathy. As such, it is arguable that bettering our understanding of online emotions could also further our comprehension of empathic experience in cyberspace (and vice versa), thus making this an area of inquiry that it would be very promising to further explore.

5 It is important to preliminarily stress that, within Goldie’s account, emotions are personal processes, namely they are processes undergone by someone to whom the emotions can be ascribed. From this perspective, Goldie’s view differs from the idea – at the core, for example, of accounts of affective atmospheres (cf. Riedel 2019) – that emotions can be present or circulate without them being the emotions of a particular experiencer. For Goldie, both the emotional processes, and the current and dispositional states that are part of it, are indeed individual mental states.

6 The notion of ‘narrative’ is employed by Goldie to refer to specific features of emotions, including the fact that their constituents are intelligibly related as parts of an evaluative process. These are features that distinguishe emotions from other processes, for instance those whose components are connected merely by causal relationships. As such, the notion of ‘narrative’ has a defining role in Goldie’s theory, and indeed he refers explicitly to his own account as a ‘narrative account’ (2011).

7 For example, my anxiety about an impending deadline may be caused by lack of sleep, but this does not entail that the lack of sleep is a constituent of my emotion (nor that it is its object, as highlighted by Solomon [1973, 25] through a similar example).

8 Goldie’s view is also different from (although not incompatible with) an extended account of mental states, and, in particular, affects. Expanding the Extended Mind thesis to include various forms of affective experience, Colombetti and Roberts (2015) suggest that under certain circumstances (i.e. when they play particular functional roles) also objects that are external to the body can be components of the emotion itself, so that the constituents of emotions need not be confined within ‘biological boundaries’. This view is neither defended nor presupposed or implicated by Goldie’s theory; however, it seems possible to pursue an integration of the two.

9 Online, various dynamics can contribute to emotion regulation and dysregulation, and this corroborates the idea that emotions can be shaped through interactions in cyberspace. In their exploration of how affects can be regulated and dysregulated on the internet, Krueger and Osler (2019) highlight how these phenomena are essentially social, an idea with which my application of Goldie’s account is in strong alignment.

10 See, for example, research on the centrality of anger in online debates (Wollebæk et al. 2019).

11 Norlock (2017) highlights the role of imaginative relationships in online shaming, which appears to be a key affectively-laden dynamic on social media.

12 For example, Jakoby and Reiser (2014, 71) note that ‘[t]he freedom from time restrictions and the expression of ongoing grief without seeking recovery are typical of the virtual expression of grief.’

13 Grief is another emotion the experience and expression of which seems to be subject to specific rules online (see e.g. Jakoby and Reiser 2014).

14 It is certainly possible that some of the emotional expressions interpreted by an audience as anger (or even described by an experiencer as such) are not manifestations of anger, but rather of other emotions. However, assuming that people do not mis-label emotions expressed online more than it is the case with emotions expressed offline, we have no reasons to doubt that the more frequent manifestations of anger on the internet go hand in hand with more frequent experiences of this emotion.

15 A similar point is made by Osler (2021) with regard to the experience of empathy, as she argues that online we can empathetically perceive others in ways that parallel, at least to an extent, the dynamics which are the core of offline empathy.