Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.46640/imr.11.20.7
Digital Soul: Media Intermediation of Emotions in the Internet Age
Amela Delić
; University of Tuzla, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Journalism, Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Abstract
The Internet age of media communication has been gradually and subtly changing the way in which we experience ourselves and the world we live in. Broadcasting our lives on the web also involves the everyday exteriorization of emotions onto the technical mediators of the third degree, as Jensen calls them (2006). Expressions of emotional experience is something we see every day on social networks, but they are also becoming an integral part of user content under the media text on web portals. These so-called intellectual technologies are acquiring some of the essential human characteristics such as rationality, memory, calculation, and translation, as well as emotionality and communication (Carr 2014, Turkle 2011).
Where do Emotions live when we transfer them into the virtual world and how do they become an integral part of media content? Where does one’s soul live when transferred to one’s virtual self? These are the questions we will try to answer in the first part of this paper.
We will analyse the virtual space, its possibilities and limitations. We will discuss the potential of online media to mediate emotional experiences. We will also seek to understand technology and devices as an alternative humanity, when people fail or refuse to act by themselves. We will try to find answers to questions about the consequences of such mediation, referring to the research of other scholars including Siva Vaidhyanathan, Sherry Turkle, Nicholas Carr, and others. In the second part, we will discuss the subtle encroachment of the emotional upon the world of the media.
The last part of the paper will present some literary analyses of media intermediation that sporadically appear in works by world-renown writers (Rushdie, Hugo, Mehmedinović, Sábato, Spengler...) and the interaction of their understanding of the media with McLuhan’s view of media intermediation and the extension/mutilation of senses.
Keywords
emotions; digital soul; media; media intermediation; internet age; virtual space
Hrčak ID:
278167
URI
Publication date:
26.5.2022.
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