ABSTRACT
The tracking, collection, and measurement of human emotional expression is of increasing importance to the business models of social media platforms such as Facebook, part of a broader integration of the computational and psychological sciences today. Facebook’s shifting discourse around connectivity and feeling “good” is tightly tied to the company’s ability to understand and potentially shape user affect and emotion through novel techniques such as digital phenotyping and sentiment analysis; the company’s changing rhetoric regarding its platform as a medium for human connectivity parallels its increased engagement with tracking human emotional expression. This chapter contextualizes this emerging “emotive politics” within the longer history of visions for technology as a social good, defined narrowly to benefit existing Silicon Valley power structures around race, class, and gender. Emerging out of these technical and social conditions are social media “empires of feeling,” conditioning contemporary controversies around social media manipulation, fake news, and contemporary propaganda.
