From the virulence of fake news to the rise of psychographic profiling, emotion has become ascendant. The new frontier of capitalization is not outward, but inward—the inner life of affect and emotion, desire and disposition. This book lays that new reality out with a series of close case studies.

A new set of technologies are emerging, from facial coding to affective computing, that attempt to render the emotional into the machine-readable. At the same time, social media and smart home devices are becoming empathic, attempting to draw out our affective participation and elicit our emotional expression. In these encounters with the medial and the technical, the emotional is remade.

Combining a close analysis of contemporary technologies such as Affectiva, Facebook, and
Alexa with critical media theory, Logic of Feeling: Technology’s Quest to Capitalize Emotion examines how the quest to operationalize this inner life begins to reconfigure feeling itself.