Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid
Changing Feelings about Technology, from the Telegraph to Twitter
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
An Entrepreneur Best Book of the Year
Facebook makes us lonely. Selfies breed narcissism. On Twitter, hostility reigns. Pundits and psychologists warn that digital technologies substantially alter our emotional states, but in this lively investigation of changing feelings about technology, we learn that the gadgets we use don’t just affect how we feel—they can profoundly change our sense of self. When we say we’re bored, we don’t mean the same thing as a Victorian dandy. Could it be that political punditry has helped shape a new kind of anger? Luke Fernandez and Susan Matt take us back in time to consider how our feelings of loneliness, boredom, vanity, and anger have evolved in tandem with new technologies.
“Technologies have been shaping [our] emotional culture for more than a century, argue computer scientist Luke Fernandez and historian Susan Matt in this original study. Marshalling archival sources and interviews, they trace how norms (say, around loneliness) have shifted with technological change.”
—Nature
“A powerful story of how new forms of technology are continually integrated into the human experience.”
—Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Weber State University educators Fernandez, an assistant computing professor, and Matt, a history professor, productively combine their expertise in this informative book about the cultural link between emotions and technology. Examining various platforms and devices, from the 19th-century telegraph to modern innovations, including Facebook and smartphones, they tell a powerful story of how new forms of technology are continually integrated into the human experience. A particularly fascinating chapter outlines the history of anger in American society, from a trait to be publicly suppressed, especially in marginalized groups, to something which social media has transformed into "a right of all." Another revealing section compares modern concerns about the narcissism of selfies to 19th-century moralizing about photography perhaps surprisingly, observers then thought photographs might dispel rather than promote vanity, by providing people with more honest portraits than had been customary in painting. Rather than condemn modern technology out of hand, Fernandez and Matt simply connect emotional constants of the human experience to new platforms that alter how they are expressed and perceived. Anyone interested in seeing the digital age through a new perspective should be pleased with this rich account.