ABSTRACT
This essay examines the relationship between technology and emotion in the modern era. It contends that modern machinery created some brand new emotional states – like neurasthenia and FOMO – and also reshaped some older feelings. The industrialisation of daily life disrupted many longstanding emotional patterns, radically transforming love, loneliness and grief, for instance. But modern machinery also was used as a means to assuage some of the very emotional problems that industrialism had created. Finally, as the essay will demonstrate, many in the modern era came to believe that not only might technology alleviate emotional suffering but it might also detect and measure feeling as well.
