All the feels

The internet is the biggest emotion disrupter of our time. It wasn’t long ago that we muddled through with a stray ;-) or two but now we have an entire pantheon of emojis, memes, and gifs to tinge our reactions with subtle moods. We know how to evoke empathy for extremely specific feelings with TFW (that feeling when), exclaim our solidarity with This^ and maintain dating-app relationships with an artful combination of 🙈 and 😍

This emotional disruption has brought its fair share of new challenges too. Psychologists tell us that tech-obsessed teens lack empathy. Loneliness, often tied to the overuse of screens, is at epidemic levels. Netflix documentaries tell us that outrage, the most viral emotion on social media, is driving us further apart.

Instead of raging against the machines, I think we can learn to expand our emotional range. Technology has the capacity to enrich our emotional lives. That’s what Feels Guide is all about.

Signs you might need to subscribe

• You are waking up in the middle of the night to doomscroll and you can’t seem to stop

• You’ve felt that little leap of anxiety as you see those three dots appear and then suddenly disappear

• You have definitely used more than one exclamation point to end a sentence in email!!!

• You have an irrepressible urge to get cheeky with Siri (and sometimes feel a bit smug about it)

• You are quite certain you are catching feelings from people in your feed and you want to understand how that happens stop it from happening

• You are 99.9% sure that the internet is turning *certain people* into rage-filled chaos goblins

• You are basking in the love from an accumulation of likes on your latest TikTok post

• You feel curiously compelled to use cry filters on Snapchat and you’re not even sad

• You’ve heard that 5 feels equals one actual human emotion but you can’t track down the source

• You consider What's App your love language

The Feels Guide guide

That’s me! I’m Pamela Pavliscak (pav-li-check) and I study emotion on the internet. There isn’t a word for this yet so I use the title “tech emotionographer.” It’s kind of like an ethnographer who observes phenomena and describes culture where the phenomenon is emotion and the culture is the internet.

I’ve studied human-computer interaction formally at the University of Michigan, practiced it as a design researcher for companies like Google and IKEA, and now teach it as a professor at Pratt Institute in NYC and share what I learn here and on Medium, Instagram, and Twitter.

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