ABSTRACT
This book has sought to draw attention to emotional and affective life in relation to the increasing digitisation of everyday life. This is a broad remit, and is one we approached through key areas in which questions as to the emotional and affective implications of digitisation are particularly prominent and requiring of social scientific analysis. Our aims have not been definitional nor singular. The processes that are labelled as emotion and affect are multiple, from non-conscious psychophysiological activity to social and cultural meaning-making through language. These processes operate as dimensions that span the contents and boundaries of individual bodies. Moreover, many disciplines have directed their explanatory power to attempt to capture, define, and categorise the multiplicity of emotional and affective life. Making sense of the entirety of this complex terrain is no insubstantial task, and it is one beyond the capacities of the current book. Our approach has been to articulate a philosophical orientation that remains open to notions of multiplicity in relation to emotional and affective life, which we think befits a social scientific approach that has been largely missing to date. This required resources from the philosophy of science in terms of highlighting notions of multiplicity in relation to forms of knowledge (e.g. Vinciane Despret) and philosophy and theory in relation to highlighting how mass datafication is creating new forms of psycho-social life (e.g. Gilbert Simondon).
