Search

This book seeks to understand emotions in the virtual world. It explores embodiment, hybridization, and emotions within interactions mediated by a virtual avatar.The work aims to contribute to reflection within the sociology of emotion, creating a line of continuity that starts from the classical concept of empathy, passing through its virtualization and arriving at the transformation of everyday life online. Therefore, this work lends itself as a starting proposition, analysing different themes, from online emotions to sex, from the virtualization of bodies to their veneration, and from the internet of things to the internet of life.Examining emotions such as empathy, love, anger, and fear in the virtual world, it uses the metaverse as a case study for human cognitive and emotional embodiment mediated by avatars. This book will appeal to scholars and students interested in the sociology of emotion, the sociology of innovation, interaction, science and technology studies, media studies, and game studies.

The Artefacts of Digital Mental Health focuses on smartphone apps, wearables devices, and ingestible sensors, which are at the centre of research, development, and investment in mental health and digitalisation. The book aims to examine digital mental health through three artefacts that are defined by their ubiquity, everydayness, popularity, innovation and hype, and emergent qualities. It engages with theoretical approaches to technology, mental health, and wellbeing informed by Science and Technology Studies, sociological studies of health and mental health, and sociomaterialism. The book brings together different theories of mental health, subjectivity, the body, care, and digitalisation alongside biodigital artefacts as exemplars of transformations in digital mental health.

Using a novel approach to consider the available literature and research, this book focuses on the psychology of social media based on the assumption that the experience of being in a social media has an impact on both our identity and social relationships. In order to ‘be online', an individual has to create an online presence – they have to share information about themselves online. This online self is presented in different ways, with diverse goals and aims in order to engage in different social media activities and to achieve desired outcomes. Whilst this may not be a real physical presence, that physicality is becoming increasingly replicated through photos, video, and ever-evolving ways of defining and describing the self online. Moreover, individuals are using both PC-based and mobile-based social media as well as increasingly making use of photo and video editing tools to carefully craft and manipulate their online self. This book therefore explores current debates in Cyberpsychology, drawing on the most up-to-date theories and research to explore four main aspects of the social media experience (communication, identity, presence and relationships). In doing so, it considers the interplay of different areas of psychological research with current technological and security insight into how individuals create, manipulate and maintain their online identity and relationships. The social media are therefore at the core of every chapter, with the common thread throughout being the very unique approach to considering diverse and varied online behaviours that may not have been thus far considered from this perspective. It covers a broad range of both positive and negative behaviours that have now become integrated into the daily lives of many westernised country's Internet users, giving it an appeal to both scholarly and industry readers alike.

Using a novel approach to consider the available literature and research, this book focuses on the psychology of social media based on the assumption that the experience of being in a social media has an impact on both our identity and social relationships. In order to ‘be online', an individual has to create an online presence – they have to share information about themselves online. This online self is presented in different ways, with diverse goals and aims in order to engage in different social media activities and to achieve desired outcomes. Whilst this may not be a real physical presence, that physicality is becoming increasingly replicated through photos, video, and ever-evolving ways of defining and describing the self online. Moreover, individuals are using both PC-based and mobile-based social media as well as increasingly making use of photo and video editing tools to carefully craft and manipulate their online self. This book therefore explores current debates in Cyberpsychology, drawing on the most up-to-date theories and research to explore four main aspects of the social media experience (communication, identity, presence and relationships). In doing so, it considers the interplay of different areas of psychological research with current technological and security insight into how individuals create, manipulate and maintain their online identity and relationships. The social media are therefore at the core of every chapter, with the common thread throughout being the very unique approach to considering diverse and varied online behaviours that may not have been thus far considered from this perspective. It covers a broad range of both positive and negative behaviours that have now become integrated into the daily lives of many westernised country's Internet users, giving it an appeal to both scholarly and industry readers alike.

Nothing seems more far removed from the visceral, bodily experience of emotions than the cold, rational technology of the Internet. But as this collection shows, the internet and emotions intersect in interesting and surprising ways. Internet and Emotions is the fruit of an interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars from the sociology of emotions and communication and media studies. It features theoretical and empirical chapters from international researchers who investigate a wide range of issues concerning the sociology of emotions in the context of new media. The book fills a substantial gap in the social research of digital technology, and examines whether the internet invokes emotional states differently from other media and unmediated situations, how emotions are mobilized and internalized into online practices, and how the social definitions of emotions are changing with the emergence of the internet. It explores a wide range of behaviors and emotions from love to mourning, anger, resentment and sadness. What happens to our emotional life in a mediated, disembodied environment, without the bodily element of physical co-presence to set off emotional exchanges? Are there qualitatively new kinds of emotional exchanges taking place on the internet? These are only some of the questions explored in the chapters of this book, with quite surprising answers.

Travelling through theories of emotion and affect, this book addresses the key ways in which media studies can be brought to bear upon everyday encounters with online cultures and practices. The book takes stock of where we are emotionally with regard to the Internet in the context of other screen media.