American Emotions and Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter
Location
Room 207/205 Traditional Presentations
Document Type
Presentation
Start Date
24-2-2018 2:15 PM
End Date
24-2-2018 3:45 PM
Description
Americans today worry that modern technology is changing their personalities and their emotions. Is Social Media increasing our anger? Is Facebook making us lonely? Have we become a nation of selfie-taking narcissists? Are we unable to tolerate boredom? Are we still capable of awe? Such questions abound in the popular press, yet they lack a clear sense of the past. This paper offers a new perspective on these questions, as it uses the methods of the history of emotions to place contemporary Americans’ emotional relationship with technology in historical perspective, from the telegraph to Twitter. The paper will demonstrate how several key emotional experiences, including loneliness, narcissism, and anger, have changed in response to new technologies. For instance, American expectations about loneliness have been transformed as the solitude of the prairie gave way to loneliness on the net. Once considered an inevitable and perhaps virtuous part of the human condition, today, in an age of constant connection, loneliness has become a psychological problem and a health hazard. Worries about sinful vanity that were sparked by early photography and mirrors have been replaced with anxieties about narcissism on Facebook. Anger, a taboo emotion for much of the twentieth century, is today experiencing a resurgence as Americans develop news styles of emotional expression. The paper will examine these transformations as it sketches the contours of a new American self that is taking shape today. The paper draws from our forthcoming book, Angry, Bored, and Stupid: How Americans have Felt about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter, under contract with Harvard University Press.
American Emotions and Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter
Room 207/205 Traditional Presentations
Americans today worry that modern technology is changing their personalities and their emotions. Is Social Media increasing our anger? Is Facebook making us lonely? Have we become a nation of selfie-taking narcissists? Are we unable to tolerate boredom? Are we still capable of awe? Such questions abound in the popular press, yet they lack a clear sense of the past. This paper offers a new perspective on these questions, as it uses the methods of the history of emotions to place contemporary Americans’ emotional relationship with technology in historical perspective, from the telegraph to Twitter. The paper will demonstrate how several key emotional experiences, including loneliness, narcissism, and anger, have changed in response to new technologies. For instance, American expectations about loneliness have been transformed as the solitude of the prairie gave way to loneliness on the net. Once considered an inevitable and perhaps virtuous part of the human condition, today, in an age of constant connection, loneliness has become a psychological problem and a health hazard. Worries about sinful vanity that were sparked by early photography and mirrors have been replaced with anxieties about narcissism on Facebook. Anger, a taboo emotion for much of the twentieth century, is today experiencing a resurgence as Americans develop news styles of emotional expression. The paper will examine these transformations as it sketches the contours of a new American self that is taking shape today. The paper draws from our forthcoming book, Angry, Bored, and Stupid: How Americans have Felt about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter, under contract with Harvard University Press.