MIXED FEELINGS: THE PLATFORMISATION OF MOODS AND VIBES

Abstract

Over the past few years, digital platforms from different sectors have started tailoring their content to both respond to and create certain moods, vibes, or ‘ambiences’. In so doing, they become ‘atmospheric architectures’ (Bohme 2020), entering the industry of emotional regulation. I posit that a critical-phenomenological framework is a productive epistemological, theoretical, and methodological resource for scrutinising this shift precisely at the intersection of embodied affect and the political economy of platformisation. By critical phenomenology I mean a phenomenological disposition that is not blind to the social, technical, and political environment in which it is situated (Couldry and Kallinikos 2018). This paper also dialogues with recent discussions both in public discourse and the relevant scholarship about a latent change in our digital sociality, in which the values for which we once celebrated digital media are now being replaced by a different mode of consumption, fruition, and attention (John 2022). Using the contemporary case studies to flesh out these new formations in emotional capitalism (Illouz 2007), I propose that we are entering a new stage in programmed sociality (Bucher 2018), focused less on sharing, connecting, or engaging, and more on the platformisation of the merely felt. The examination of this phenomenon demands us to acknowledge the significance of those mixed feelings – which involve an interplay of the affective and the computational – and of their entanglement with a profit-oriented corporate technoscape.