ABSTRACT
As digital natives grow into adolescence, social network sites (SNS hereafter) are becoming one of the most important places for sociability in connected societies. A recent study showed that young people in Sweden (12–16 years old) spend more time with their friends online than they do offline (Medierådet 2010). Thus, digital technology in general, and SNS in particular, are becoming indispensable platforms for socializing and organizing activities of all kinds. In fact, socializing without the Internet and mobile accesses to it is probably unimaginable for many youngsters today. One outcome of this shift toward the online as the social scene is the displacement of emotion displays from more private and group confined settings to become performed on the screen, visible for an entire network of selected peers to watch, comment, judge, and perhaps share with others. Together with this displacement, we see an increase of the kind of feeling management and emotion control that Hochschild (1983/2003) found in her groundbreaking study of smiling flight attendants. Feelings have been understood as signalling our hopes, fears, and expectations, thus carrying with them information on who we are. Hochschild observed how this signalling function became impaired when the management of emotion was socially engineered. What she discovered among smiling flight attendants in the early-'80s is now happening on a full scale online. The purpose of this chapter is to understand the rationality of emotion displays on SNS. While the flight attendants in Hochschild's study were smiling in order to convey feelings of safety and for customers to feel positively for the chosen airline, the question in this chapter is for what purposes feelings are managed online, i.e., what is the rationality of emotion displays online?
