ABSTRACT

This chapter traces the political consequences of the emotional architecture of social media. It is part of a larger project of taking seriously the place of emotion in mediated contexts, and views social media as a key site in this respect. The chapter views emotional architecture as a key factor in shaping engagement with and participation through social media, looking more closely at Facebook. As a result of concerns about the detrimental consequences of anti-social affective expression online, issues around the expression of emotion have been central to the generation of social media architectures. The history of the Facebook emoji reactions highlights the commodification and marketization of public emotion, or what we might characterize as the emotional economy of our mediatized world. Facebook is not the only social media organization to erect emotional architectures for commercial gain, but the prominent example of its reactions emoji highlights the fact that the "positivity bias" of social media has been carefully engineered.