Work Team F-61: Communicating emotions through the Internet

Work Group description

More and more, the access to information and communication technologies (ICTs), distinguished by their increasing presence in our urban spaces, is becoming easier for the citizens. There are practices involving a continuous and daily choice, which have an important and essential function for our social life and our relationships with others: the human and social use of ICTs, which we will consider as eminently emotional. That's why in this work group we are interested in shared emotions in the daily use of ICTs.

The emotions are changing the natural and spontaneous language of everyday life. New terms enter in the discursive arena and new areas are produced, for example, within the field of technology. Only in recent years has been understood that the emotions and new technologies remain in a very close relationship. Especially on the affectivity subject, we had opportunity to observe several examples, as: when a mother speaks by phone with her children and her family, crying; or when a young immigrant "go to party" with his friends from his country connected to the Network; or when two young lovers are talking in a chat conversation from thousand miles away. That is, a range of emotional performances becoming through the use of ICTs.

When we are in front of a screen, a series of mechanisms are generated, that do emerge our most intimate aspects and that techno science narrative has tagged with the term of "disclosure". The "disclosure" helps us to explain the fascination, so extended nowadays, of talking with strangers or people we already know, but through a screen that allow us to say things that we would never say face to face. Especially things that belong to our private and intimate sphere, that is: to express our emotions. By the other hand, this allows us to understand the success of these technologies in different aspects of life. Phenomena such as Facebook, ensure just that, contact to someone you already know, but into a more intimate scale, where it is possible to express more private emotions or to bring our relationships to another level. And everything is happening through the language. This reasoning allows us to rethink in different terms the affective relations, the intimate dimension of new technologies and the emotions that we feel when we are in front of a screen.