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“In this book, the authors delve deep into the affective vibrancies and
forces of digital life. As they show, feelings are the foundation of many
online interactions and content. Feelings are aroused with and through
the internet and compel us to want to stay engaged online - to upload, like,
comment, share and post photos, videos, emojis, GIFs and memes. This
book provides important insights into these processes.”
Prof. Deborah Lupton, author of Data Selves:
More-than-Human Perspectives (Polity) and
Digital Food Cultures (Routledge)
“From affective atmospheres to woebots, from artificial intelligence to the

emojification of the everyday, Darren Ellis and Ian Tucker pursue how bodies,
collective and individual, are continually shifting in conjunction with technological
and digital processes. Always empirically situated, Ellis and Tucker’s nuanced
psycho-social approach to affect and emotion reveals possibilities for critical
intervention into our contemporary moment, while simultaneously opening
pathways for future-oriented analyses to undertake.”
Prof. Gregory J. Seigworth, co-editor of The
Affect Theory Reader (Duke University Press,
2010) and co-editor of Capacious: Journal for
Emerging Affect Inquiry
Emotion in the Digital Age
Emotion in the Digital Age examines how emotion is understood, researched

and experienced in relation to practices of digitisation and datafication said to
constitute a digital age. The overarching concern of the book is with how emotion
operates in, through, and with digital technologies. The digital landscape is vast,
and as such, the authors focus on four key areas of digital practice: artificial
intelligence, social media, mental health, and surveillance. Interrogating each area
shows how emotion is commodified, symbolised, shared, and experienced, and as
such, operates in multiple dimensions. This includes tracing the emotional impact
of early mass media (e.g. cinema) through to efforts to programme AI agents
with skills in emotional communication (e.g. mental health chatbots). This timely
study offers theoretical, empirical and practical insight regarding the ways that
digitisation is changing knowledge and experience of emotion and affective life.
Crucially, this involves both the multiple versions of digital technologies designed
to engage with emotion (e.g. emotional-AI) through to the broader emotional
impact of living in digitally saturated environments. The authors argue that this
constitutes a psycho-social way of being in which digital technologies and emotion
operate as key dimensions of the ways we simultaneously relate to ourselves as
individual subjects and to others as part of collectives. As such, Emotion in the
Digital Age will prove important reading for students and researchers in emotion
studies, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and related fields.
Darren Ellis is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences at the

University of East London, UK, and co-author of Social Psychology of Emotion.
Ian Tucker is Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of East

London, UK, and co-author of Social Psychology of Emotion.
Routledge Studies in Science, Technology and Society
36 Scientific Imperialism
Another Facet of Interdisciplinarity
Edited by Uskali Mäki, Adrian Walsh and Manuela Fernández Pinto
37 Future Courses of Human Societies

Critical Reflections from the Natural and Social Sciences
Edited by Kléber Ghimire
38 Science, Africa and Europe

Processing Information and Creating Knowledge
Edited by Patrick Harries, Martin Lengwiler and Nigel Penn
39 The Sociology of “Structural Disaster”

Beyond Fukushima
Miwao Matsumoto
40 The Cultural Authority of Science

Comparing across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas
Edited by Bauer, MW, Pansegrau, P and Shukla, R
41 Blockchain and Web 3.0

Social, Economic, and Technological Challenges
Edited by Massimo Ragnedda and Giuseppe Destefanis
42 Understanding Digital Events

Bergson, Whitehead, and the Experience of the Digital
Edited by David Kreps
43 Big Data—A New Medium?

Edited by Natasha Lushetich
For the full list of books in the series: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Stud

ies-in-Science-Technology-and-Society/book-series/SE0054
Emotion in the Digital Age
Technologies, Data and Psychosocial Life
Darren Ellis and Ian Tucker

First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Darren Ellis and Ian Tucker
The right of Darren Ellis and Ian Tucker to be identified as authors of this
work has been asserted by him/her/them in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 9781138091030 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781315108322 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
In memory of David Tucker. Ian X
Contents
Acknowledgements x
1 Emotion in the digital age 1
2 The history and emergence of emotion-technology relations 12
3 Artificial intelligence and emotion 32
4 Social media and emotion 56
5 Digital mental health 84
6 Surveillance and emotion 101
7 Digital futures and emotion 117
Index 125
Acknowledgements
This book follows from our previous Social Psychology of Emotion (2015) book,
which finished with a realisation of the growing influence of digital and data prac-
tices on our emotional and affective lives. We would like to thank Routledge for
including this book in their Studies in Science, Technology and Society Series
(particular thanks to Neil Jordan and Alice Salt).
We would like to acknowledge the funding provided to support research dis-
cussed in the book, including the “Social Media and Austerity” projects funded
by EPSRC Communities and Culture Network and discussed in Chapter Five.
The University of East London (UEL) also partly funded the empirical work on
a project entitled “Experiences of Social Media” in Chapter Four. Additionally,
the work in Chapter Six was supported by UEL School of Psychology funding.
The ideas developed in this book have emerged through many hugely valu-
able conversations and discussions with colleagues and friends. We would like
to thank them all, as they have been invaluable to the completion of this book. In
particular, we would like to thank Steve Brown, John Cromby, Lewis Goodings,
Dave Harper, Ava Kanyeredzi, Anna Lavis, Laura McGrath, Paula Reavey, Tony
Sampson, Buadaplup Sánchez-Escribano, Paul Stenner, and Angie Voela. We
owe you all a drink (or two).
Last, but not least, we thank our families: Nicola, Katherine, Noah, Lily, Isaac,
Otto, and Arthur.
1 Emotion in the digital age
Why emotion, why digital?

Digitised emotion almost seems contradictory. Can emotion be simulated through
digits? The cold binary codes of zeros and ones may appear in tune to the logic
of cognition in the mind, but can they emulate the emotional affairs of the heart?
Claims that emotional activity can be captured, identified, recognised, and poten-
tially simulated digitally have become increasingly prevalent (Fry, 2019; McStay,
2016; 2018). Additionally, not only are we imbuing digital technologies with emo-
tion, but technologies are emotionally engaging us, as digitality has exponentially
increased. Throughout this book, we plot some of the ways these relationships are
forming. To these ends, the book draws together relevant philosophies, theories,
and models of emotion to detail some of the ways that processes categorised as
emotion are being mobilised by digital technologies. We start with processual,
relational, and psychosocial approaches to think about the emergence of emotion
and affective life through relations between bodies, collectives and technologies.
Our approach is necessarily selective given the reach of digitality into all areas
of life. We focus of four areas of significance to the study of emotion in a digital
age: Emotion-related artificial intelligence, social media, digital mental health,
and surveillance.
Discussion of the impacts of digital technologies often focuses on their tech-
nical capabilities rather than the underlying social and psychological processes.
Moreover, it is often what this means for future life that is discussed; a portrayal
of a future digital life acts as the meaning framework for considering digital tech-
nologies in the present. Digital technologies are often judged in terms of their
potential, from providing more tailored shopping experience through behavioural
economics to more automated work environments. However, analysing life in a
digital age through the concept of emotion allows for more breadth and depth of
digital activity to be explored, which allows for a sense of psychological life to
feature. This is important because 1) The human is often used as a category to
critique digitality – with the latter deemed to be some kind of threat to and/or
enhancement of the former; 2) where digital activity is related to human activ-
ity, it often includes a definition of a pre-existing individual in mind. Focusing
on emotion allows us to draw upon a range of theory, from the social sciences,
philosophy, and broader scientific theory and practice, to interrogate the emer-
gence of digital life. Avoiding a reductionist approach that locates emotional
activity solely at the level of the physiological is important to draw out the limits
and borders of digital life. Our approach is to address emotion as encompassing
and transcending psychological, social, and physiological categories. Moreover,
it is not something to be set against other categories of psychological life, which
has often been the case historically – such as the distinction between emotion
and rationality, or, more recently, emotion and cognition (England, 2019). Such
categories are not bounded distinct entities, but rather, can be thought of as co-
constituting elements of psychological life. Emotions are rarely felt in isolation
from beliefs, memories, perceptions, attitudes, etc. Indeed, our whole psychologi-
cal life is infused with emotion, which is inherently related to social and historical
context, both individually and collectively.
The scope of this book is broad, and we will not succeed in covering all areas
pertaining to emotion in a digital age. The saturation of our social worlds with
digital technologies means that there are very few areas of everyday life that are
not, or cannot, be mediated by technology. There are the emotional relationships
we develop with personal technologies, such as mobile phones, computers, and
fitness trackers. There are the emotional relations made possible by the internet,
which include new forms of communication (e.g., online forums), as well as new
practices that can elicit emotional responses (e.g., becoming frustrated with online
tailored advertising). There is the breed of new technologies that claim to be able
to identify, label, and potentially manipulate emotion. Technological advances
have made it possible to process facial expressions and capture physiological
responses, leading to claims that such activity brings emotion into the reach of the
digital. Finally, although not exhaustively, there is the development of robots and
virtual agents that are designed to interact emotionally. Each one of these areas is
worthy of a book in itself. Our analysis is selective, focusing on areas we argue
are key issues for life in a digital age, namely emotion-related artificial intelli-
gence, social media, digital mental health, and surveillance. We will see that these
areas intersect, and as such, are not discrete domains, but rather, operate as promi-
nent arenas in which emotion is at stake in relation to digitisation and datafication.
A word on terminology
The terms emotion and affect are often presented together and used inter-change-
ably. Sometimes, this is acknowledged, with a reason provided (or not!). Part of
the issue is how to articulate their use without providing a clear definition of each.
In this book, we aim to use the terms as they are deployed by those we discuss.
Where this is not possible, we will state so. In the sections in which we discuss the
emotional and/or affective implications of a digital technology (e.g., when it is not
explicitly designed to relate to emotion/affect, but we claim it does), we will pro-
vide a definition. We fully acknowledge existing theory that frames affect in terms
of processes that impact upon individual and social life in ways that are presented
as non-cognitive and/or non-conscious, for instance, in psychoanalysis, critical
Emotion in the digital age 3
media studies, and philosophy. Many of these feature in the field of affect stud-
ies that has emerged strongly in the last 15–20 years (Ahmed, 2004; Ash, 2015;
Clough, 2007; Gregg & Seigworth, 2009; Leys, 2017; Thrift, 2008). There is also
prominent use of affect in relation to affective neuroscience, which emphasises
neurological activity, for example, in relation to mood disorders (e.g., depression
and anxiety) as well as a broader set of psychological activity (Davidson et al.,
2002; Panksepp, 2010; Stein, 2003). The prominence of neurological activity
in such accounts means that questions of cognition and/or consciousness do not
commonly feature.
Whilst affect has featured in approaches that emphasise non-cognitive and
non-conscious approaches (Wetherell, 2012), emotion has often been used in
accounts that emphasise the importance of culture and language in the develop-
ment of meaningful experiences that can be categorised in emotional terms (e.g.,
fear, love, and anger) (Harré, 1986). Emotional categories have been thought of
as being culturally-specific references used when discussing and representing our
feelings, for instance, the use of emojis as visual representations of feeling. The
term emotion has more cultural currency than affect, as well as being core to
mainstream psychological models. Such models have garnered increased promi-
nence through their central role in the development of computerised attempts to
capture and categorise physiological expressions as different kinds of emotion,
for instance, the widespread use of universalist models of a basic set of emo-
tions in artificial intelligence- (AI) based technologies (e.g., facial expression
recognition).
This book considers emotion and affect as core concepts to understand life in
a digital age. They form part of the overall psycho-social operation of experience,
not just discrete psychological forms operating psycho-biologically “within” peo-
ple. Throughout the book, we argue that there is more at stake, emotionally, than
is often considered. For instance, emotion is not just operating at the level of facial
expression but is a more fundamental part of how we orient to ourselves and our
environments. Emotion and affect are important parts of the ways we experience
the world, both in relation to ourselves as individuals and to others. As our lives
increasingly operate in and through digital practices, and processes of datafication
therein, the dimensions of emotion and affect through which we engage and feel
our ways through the world are mediated by digital and data practices. Emotion
and affect are implicated in terms of the relations we have with digital and data
practices, as well as being a core design aim of the technology (e.g., affective
computing). This requires an expanded analytic unit, which goes beyond focusing
on the impact of the functional aim of emotion-related technologies.
We recognise the lack of a universally agreed definition for either emotion
or affect. We also note important attempts to frame processes associated with
emotion and affect through other concepts, such as feeling, e.g. Cromby (2015).
However, we are reluctant to rely on an alternative concept to describe the psy-
chological and social processes associated with existing concepts of emotion and
affect. Creating an additional concept is likely to create as many problems as solu-
tions and can end up subject to the same accusations of essentialising as theories
of emotion and affect. As such, we follow the tradition of using both terms. In
places, we will use affective life as a generic term (e.g., when not discussing spe-
cific emotional and/or affective activity) (Greco & Stenner, 2008; Despret, 2004).
We will not follow other non-essentialist attempts in terms of only using affect (as
a way of avoiding the reductionist baggage of mainstream psychological theory),
as much of what we discuss concerns major psychological models. We also do not
want to exclude the value of emphasising the role of cultural practices in the for-
mation and maintenance of emotion categories (i.e., the impact of language and
meaning in definitions of emotion). The scope is broad, but one which we hope
draws sufficient and valuable attention to developing theoretical and empirical
understandings of emotion and affective processes in a digital age.
Computation and emotion

The advent of computation catalysed much thinking about the potential for
technologies to intersect with psychological processes. In the first fifty years of
computation, this mostly focused on intelligence and then more discrete catego-
ries of cognition (Wilson, 2010). This is primarily due to the dominance of the
information processing model of psychology that emerged in line with increased
computation in the mid-20th century. Mainstream psychology claimed that minds
work like computers, processing sensory information to form thoughts, percep-
tions, and memories (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). Cognitive psychol-
ogy has modelled emotion, but not to the same extent as the so-called “mental
processes” of intelligence, perception, attention, and language processing. These
were deemed more readily explainable in computational terms and fit into the his-
torical prioritisation of rationalist thought over emotional feeling (Ellis & Tucker,
2015). This is not to suggest that emotion has never featured in computer science,
as early attempts used a therapeutic context as the basis for exploring the potential
for technologies to mimic human communication. For instance, Weizenbaum’s
Eliza programme used natural language processing to recreate a patient-doctor
consultation (Weizenbaum, 1984). To Weizenbaum’s surprise, the computer sci-
ence field came to suggest that Eliza could create emotional responses of support
for users. Whether this was by design or not, the programme has been influential
in the growing field of digital mental health (which we will discuss in more detail
in Chapter Five). The emergence of a designated field of “Affective Computing”
has become one of the most prominent areas focused on emotion and technology
(Calvo et al., 2015; Picard, 2000). Heavily influenced by psychological theory
regarding universal emotional expression, multiple emotion recognition experi-
ments have emerged since the mid-1980s and continue apace. Affective comput-
ing is concerned with emotion as expressed at an individual physiological level
and the potential for digital technologies to identify and categorise such activ-
ity. Such work is deemed to have significant potential to inform industry prac-
tices, such as in commerce, as well as governments, in terms of national security
(Bullington, 2005). Large scale generation of data from individuals has led to
concerns regarding control and use of data. In recent years, data generation about
emotional and affective life has increased significantly, in a variety of sectors,
from advertising to health sectors (McStay, 2018). Emotion-related technolo-
gies have been studied mainly in the physical sciences (e.g., computer sciences),
which have focused on the technical advances being made. A social scientific
analysis is important for two reasons; 1) to evaluate how emotion theories are
used in, and by, the physical sciences in relation to new technological attempts to
define and manipulate emotion; and 2) to highlight some of the broader social and
psychological implications of living in societies in which digital technologies are
increasingly powerful social agents.
Life at the intersection of emotion, affect, and digitisation

Why call the present a digital age? Firstly, it is important to note that through-
out the book we often use the term a digital age, despite the book’s title being
Emotion in the Digital Age. These are similar terms, but we are keen to avoid
essentialising the current time as the defining digital epoch, as there may well be
others in the future that take new directions and consequently present new chal-
lenges. As such, we often use a digital age¸in addition to the title’s the digital age
(which was the publisher’s preference). In terms of the aims of the book, we use
the term digital age in the sense of most contemporary uses, namely to acknowl-
edge the ubiquity of computing technologies in almost all aspects of human life.
We are not, though, focusing on digital forms of emotion, which would be to enter
long-standing philosophical debates about whether machines can be programmed
to feel (although this question does arise in places in the book). Emotion has
been thought of as constituting analogic processing, whereas digitality implies a
more binary system of positive or negative, on or off, one or two. The analogue
includes and rather than just or, yellow-blue-red-green rather than just black and
white, and every other colour and shade possible. The underpinning binary logic
of digitality relates to the operation of neurons, in that they are either on or off and
they either fire a charge or do not. The nervous system has been argued as being
more stochastic (probabilistic) and analogue than many computer simulations
would have us believe. For example, Wilson (2010) documents how McCulloch
and Pitts (1943) understood a neuron’s threshold for activation as alterable. The
threshold which dictates firing is more analogue than digital, as it “varies across
a spectrum of possible values and will be altered by chemical variables (ionic
concentrations) and electrical variables (after potentials) that are also continuous
rather than discrete” (Wilson, 2010, p. 125). While emotional and affective pro-
cesses can be framed as analogic, they are often thought of as existing on dimen-
sions representing, for example, arousal (amount of) and valence (type of). It is
this contradiction between the digital life of computers and the analogical life of
emotion and affect which has captivated imaginations of science fiction writers
for millennia.
We have previously articulated a narrative of the important factors pertain-
ing to social psychology and emotion (Ellis & Tucker, 2015). This ended with
a brief discussion of “digital emotion”, by which we considered how studies of
emotion and affect may have to change in relation to the proliferation of digi-
tal technologies in societies (rather than framing a digital version of emotion).
The current book picks up where Social Psychology of Emotion left off. Our
approach is broad in the sense that it generally avoids speaking about specific
emotional categories in relation to digital life, for instance, concepts such as
love, fear, disinterest, concern, shame. These commonly understood categories
are important and valuable (e.g., the work on shame of Eve Sedgwick and Adam
Frank (2003), but ours is a broader concern with emotional and affective life in
a digital age. This is not to deny existing studies of specific emotion categories,
but this does not mean that such processes innately relate to such categories
and therefore, can only be understood according to the parameters of exist-
ing categories. For instance, an experience named as fear can co-exist with (or
transform into) one relating to excitement. We do not ascribe to a view that an
emotion (e.g., fear) exists in the form of a potentialised pattern of physiological
and psychological activity that is triggered by life events. Significant critiques
exist of the universality of emotional categories (some of which we will discuss
in Chapter Two).
The rapidly increasing technological interest in emotion is operating as a (re)
newed scientific claim as to emotional and affective life. This is not solely about
researching emotion, but about the ways that new technologies are claiming to
intervene with and inform emotion. A technological expertise is being claimed,
based on the idea that technologies are now able to unpick some of the secrets
of emotional understanding in ways not possible before and in ways out of the
reach of human perception (e.g., interpreting micro-facial expressions). The role
of industry and commerce is significant in these moves, and the imperative for
university-based research to produce “impact” beyond the academy often means
pushing at an open door when developing industry-academic partnerships for
technological research with emotion. Given that many of the technologies we
discuss are new, there is limited research to date as to their emotional and affec-
tive impact. Therefore, in certain chapters, our coverage will be on the claims of
new emotion-related technologies, what model of emotion they propagate (which
we will think of in terms of version), and their potential impact. In other areas, we
draw on original research to highlight emotion-related technologies in action and/
or to analyse people’s experiences with digitality. The scope of the book includes
emotion-related digital technologies AND emotional and affective impact of mass
digitisation of everyday life. The latter includes digital technologies more broadly
(e.g., social media) and not only those designed specifically with emotion in mind
(e.g., so-called emotional AI). The limited focus on specific emotion categories
may come as a disappointment to readers interested in particular parts of digital
life and emotion, e.g. the politics of hate often argued to be facilitated by public
social media such as Twitter (Ott, 2017). Our approach will demonstrate how
key areas of digital life are impacting upon, and intersecting with, emotional and
affective life beyond the boundaries of individual categories. This is not to suggest
that attention to specific categories is unimportant, but that the remit of this book
requires a broader approach.
Overview of emotion in a digital age
Chapter Two introduces the philosophical orientations pertaining to emotion and
affective life that shape our thinking throughout the book. Although the rela-
tionships between human bodies and technology have exponentially increased,
researching the psychological impacts of mass technologization of society are not
new. We trace some key events in the history of emotion and technology to dem-
onstrate that concerns about technology have been both a research tool in relation
to emotion as well as the focus of psychological research since the earliest days
of the discipline. Theories of emotion have attempted to address both aspects,
with a dominance of individualistic, largely psychophysiological, models featur-
ing in psychological research, and approaches addressing emotion and affect as
more social and distributed processes featuring predominantly in studies of the
impact of technologies on affective life. Both have increased in line with the rise
in use and presence of digital media in society (Ellis & Tucker, 2015). Chapter
Two provides some historical context to emotion-technology research, prior to
discussing claims as to the inherent relationality of emotion and technology. We
will draw on Vinciane Despret’s version, a concept used to frame a practice-based
analysis of emotion, emphasising context as opposed to universality; theories that
have been inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on affect; and Gilbert
Simondon’s work on individuation and affectivity. Moreover, Chapter Two details
our approach which incorporates processual, relational, and psychosocial theories
to think about emotion and affective life through collectivities, bodies, and tech-
nologies. The value of concepts emphasising process and relationality is that they
shift the analytic starting point away from established taken-for-granted forms
(e.g., universal emotional categories) to a concern with emergence of individual
forms as part of broader sets of relations that are always in the making.
Chapter Three explores the development of technologies using forms of artifi-
cial intelligence (AI) to try to track, identify, interpret, replicate, and potentially
manipulate emotion activity (much of which has been developed in affective com-
puting). AI has been associated with emotion across media, the military, the state,
private industries, and academia. The affective computing market is predicted
to reach $90 billion by 2024 and is now constituted by a range of areas. These
include (but are not exhausted by) capturing emotion through facial expression,
bodily expression, speech, text, physiological data such as skin conductance and
heart rate, and senses such as touch. Chapter Three details the underlying models
of emotion that are drawn upon within the affective computing field. It starts by
looking at Manfred Clynes’s theory of essentic forms, which suggests that emo-
tion-based expressions are traceable through parts of the body, such as the finger,
and are universal across cultures. Clynes’s theory, alongside Charles Darwin and
Paul Ekman, put forward notions of the universality of emotion (basic emotions).
These theories have been useful to people who want to develop technologies that
can, for example, measure and recognise human emotion, as they offer elegant
models of emotion that have been engineered into technologies. We look at some
of the ways that they have been modelled through, for example, facial expression
recognition systems (such as within the iBorderCtrl technologies) and Affective
Tutoring Systems (such as Affective AutoTutor), wherein students’ emotions
are recognised and manipulated. Our critical analyses include, for example, Lisa
Feldman Barret’s extensive constructionist-neuroscientific work. We argue that
affective computing technologies are some way off from being able to develop
something like an emotion-chip which Rana el Kaliouby (CEO of Affectiva) sug-
gests will run in the background of numerous technologies, generating a constant
emotional pulse. And yet, we do have systems like the iBorderCtrl scheme pres-
ently running, that uses facial micro-expression recognition to pre-screen travel-
lers and detect deception. The algorithms programmed into the detection system
can generate lasting and negative impact on people’s lives, particularly when, for
example, algorithms automate discrimination.
Chapter Four looks at some of the entanglements between bodies, emotion,
and social media. Throughout this chapter we raise questions such as: What draws
us to spend an increasing amount of our lives using social media? Do they enable
new forms of emotional and affective expression? How do social media attempt
to mobilise and manipulate emotion? What are the broader affective implications
of living in environments saturated with social media? And how is emotion mod-
elled and conceptualised in the social media context to facilitate research and
capitalise it? We explore these questions through focusing on key areas pertaining
to social media in relation to emotion and affective life: Motivation and theories
of desire, personal information, emoticons and emojis, and sentiment analysis,
considered alongside notions of digital and affective capitalism. Understanding
emotion related to social media is a nascent but blooming field of study. Research
seeking to understand emotional engagement with social media has largely been
based in theories of motivation that tend to draw on cognitive and behavioural
psychological theories. Motives are configured as internal needs that social
media have the potential to fulfil, enabling self-actualisation and individuation,
for example, through programming sociality. Here, the psychological subject is
framed as having a number of internal constructs that are relatively fixed and
stable. These models help computer scientists to develop social media platforms
that can collect data that represent these internal constructs and to further com-
partmentalise and categorise in order to fit them into data-sets and algorithms,
which can be manipulated and commodified. This chapter also examines a variety
of sentiment analysis initiatives that have been developed in attempts to capture
affective life online through, for example, collecting personal information, emoti-
cons, and emojis. Again, it is argued that these are modelled on impoverished
versions of emotion.
Chapter Five looks at the field of mental health and how it is becoming increas-
ingly digitally mediated. A broad range of digital developments in mental health
services has been proposed, from providing advice and guidance to people suffer-
ing with various mental health difficulties, through to creating digital versions of
established treatments and therapeutic interventions (e.g., Cognitive Behavioural
Therapy [CBT]). The App Industry has seen considerable potential in direct mar-
keting digital aids to common mental health difficulties such as stress, depression,
and anxiety. Indeed, Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store each has tens
of thousands of mental health-related apps on offer. There is also an appetite for
machine learning and big data analytics to gather previously unattainable large-
scale data sets, which can be used to design digital tools using artificial intel-
ligence to interact with, and offer support to, individuals experiencing mental
ill-health. Mental health care in a digital age is consequently claimed to look
very different to previous services, which were location based (e.g., institutions,
community) and which utilised specific forms of treatment (e.g., medication,
psychological therapies). Digital forms of support are not tied to specific loca-
tions, and do not always use specific interventions. They can be temporally and
spatially ready to hand, and consequently, not so reliant on real-time access to
mental health services. As such, they have considerable potential to intersect with
individuals’ ongoing emotional experiences, both in relation to their underlying
distress, as well as positive feelings that forms of support are designed to deliver
to help with the management of mental ill-health. In Chapter Five we look at two
apps that have been designed to help people manage mental health issues. The
first is a peer support forum, Elefriends, designed and run by the UK mental health
charity. The second is a totally automated app that does not include any real-time
human intervention, called Woebot.
Chapter Six focuses on emotional responses and potential impacts of digital
surveillance, which refers to the capture, storage and use of data through every-
day interactions with technologies. This includes practices not explicitly target-
ing emotion (e.g., the capture of social media data). Studies of surveillance have
tended to focus on the technical and operational capacities of technologies such as
CCTV, as well as those whose primary purpose is not explicitly surveillance, for
instance, understanding the quantity and quality of data captured by big tech com-
panies, along with their use of data. Critical theory has claimed that new digital
technologies have facilitated the commodification of information (Thrift, 2008)
and that we are increasingly living in societies of information. This work has coa-
lesced into the field of surveillance studies, which has broadened its scope beyond
the traditional visual forms of CCTV surveillance to the idea that digital tech-
nologies have facilitated new forms of surveillance through the capture, storage,
and use of information pertaining to individuals’ private lives. This ranges from
government and organisational data capture (e.g., big tech companies) through
to social media facilitating new ways for individuals to watch each other. In this
chapter, we focus on affective responses and potential impacts of datafication.
Previously, we have looked at experiences of surveillance through the spatial lens
of the concept of affective atmospheres (Ellis et al., 2013) and surveillance-apa-
theia (Ellis, 2019). Chapter Six builds on this body of work by looking at what we
term the derivatives of the datafication of the body. This chapter was left until last,
as it encompasses many of the themes from the previous chapters. Surveillance
practices are increasingly ubiquitous and are a central node that both affects, and
in turn, is affected by, emotion. The final chapter offers some concluding thoughts
and next steps discussion of important considerations for future social scientific
understanding of emotion and affective life in a digital age.
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2 The history and emergence of
emotion-technology relations
This chapter will discuss the philosophical orientations pertaining to emotional

and affective life that shape our thinking throughout the book. This involves
exploring key events in the history of emotion and technology to demonstrate
that concerns about the psychological impacts of mass technologisation of society
are not new. Technology has been both a research tool in relation to emotion as
well as the focus of psychological research since the earliest days of the discipline
(Malin, 2014). Theories of emotion have attempted to address both aspects, with
a dominance of individualistic, largely psychophysiological models featuring in
psychological research and approaches attempting to address emotion and affect
as more social and distributed processes featuring in studies of the impact of tech-
nologies on affective life. Both have increased in line with the rise in use and pres-
ence of digital media in society (Ellis & Tucker, 2015). The aim of this chapter is
to provide some historical context to research, prior to discussing claims as to the
inherent relationality of emotion and technology.
Early psychological research on emotion and technology

A presenteeism often features in coverage of the impact of digital technologies
on everyday life. Significant digital developments in recent times (e.g. smart-
phones, internet, social media) have been portrayed as a new and previously
unheralded manifestation of a powerful role for technologies in contemporary
life. Indeed, this is a large part of the motivation for writing this book. However,
relations between emotion and technologies have a long history. The context of
early technological efforts to capture and intervene in emotional life resonate with
many of the current issues surrounding emotion in a digital age. In the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, psychology was establishing its scientific credentials
through developing new methods of experimentation. This meant a move away
from methods that were deemed unscientific, such as introspection and psychoa-
nalysis, towards approaches that focused on collecting more measurable physi-
ological data (Ellis & Tucker, 2015). During the early 20th century, new studies
emerged that aimed to capture emotional activity “in real time” (e.g. Dysinger
and Ruckmick’s cinema studies – discussed below). These form the nascent links
between emotion and technology and underpin much work addressing emotion
A history of emotion-technology relations 13
in a digital age (e.g. emotion-related artificial intelligence). The links between
emotion and technology did not only feature in terms of technology being a new
methodological tool, but also in terms of new psychological studies of the impact
of new media on emotion.
During the early 20th century, new media technologies were emerging that
were deemed to have significant emotional power, e.g. cinema. The sociologi-
cal impacts of cinema as a new form of mass media were not understood, and
there was much concern about the potential power of the new mass media of
cinema to impact emotional life, particularly with regards to children, who were
seen as emotionally vulnerable. The Payne-funded cinema studies of Dysinger
and Ruckmick (1933) are a prominent example of a new technology emerging
with perceived potential to shape emotional life. The concerns about cinema at the
time resonate with contemporary concerns about digital media, e.g. widespread
coverage of portrayals of social media having negative impacts on young people’s
mental health (Berryman, Ferguson, & Negy, 2018; Calancie et al., 2017).
Other developments in the early 20th century framed emotion as something
that can be recognised and captured by technology and that doing so provided
more authentic knowledge than the existing technique of introspection (Malin,
2014). Physiological activity was taken as a direct route to emotional activity, one
not clouded by consciousness (as it was deemed to be with introspection). The
premise of this work at the time was that technologies can “know” emotion better
than humans, because they can identify the specific underpinning physiological
activity in a way that escapes human conscious awareness. For instance, we do
not know the extent of heart-rate change or skin-conductance activity that occurs
when experiencing emotion, but a technology, such as a psycho-galvanometer,
does. Understanding emotion was deemed to require a technological solution in
terms of identifying and capturing underlying physiological activity.
Malin (2014) makes the point that these moves were part of a technologisation
of science and emotion, in which the physicality of the body was privileged as the
site at which the truth of emotion could be discovered. All that was needed was
the technological means to do so (a position that remains to the present day). This
could be taken a step further in terms of thinking of emotion as technological,
because it was deemed to be physiologically based. This meant that to control
technology was to control emotion, which, at the time, was still seen as unpre-
dictable and unconstrained, as something not subject to psychological control by
consciousness (Ellis and Tucker, 2015). The sense of control was based on the
idea that technologies could objectively identify and interpret emotion, which
other methods (i.e. introspection) were not deemed able to do. In psychology,
new technologies, such as psycho-galvanometers and sonoscopes, provided the
means to capture physiological activity associated with music and speech. This
was welcomed, as it helped buttress the move away from introspection to a newly
scientific experimental psychology, in which the “truth” of psychology could be
discovered in newly formed laboratories. Despite introspection being prominent
in the early experimental research, such as in the Leipzig laboratory of Willhelm
Wundt, the concern with relying on self-reporting in introspection shifted the
14 A history of emotion-technology relations
privileged location of psychological insight from consciousness to physiology,
and it was technologies that facilitated this move. The argument was that intro-
spection “failed” because it did not provide people with understanding of their
physiology, whereby technology did.
The privileging of physiological data in terms of emotion continues to domi-
nate much emotion-related technology activity, as we will see throughout this
book, but the idea that 21st-century digital technologies are the first to intersect
with emotion is misleading. Emotion has always been thought of in relation to
technologies of the time, given that the latter are core agents in constructing our
social and physical worlds. The nature of technologies changes over time, and
therefore, so does the specificity of the arguments made. Indeed, the cultural con-
text shapes understanding of technologies, which becomes a resource for how
we frame our own experience in relation to technology: “[P]eople experience
media technology within a particular context for understanding technology itself”
(Malin, 2014, p. 238). As Ian Hacking (1999) pointed out, there is a feedback
loop in terms of cultural knowledge and individual experience, in which part of
the experience of technology comes from awareness of the cultural knowledge of
technology’s role in society, for instance, contemporary debates about excessive
internet use and addiction leading to people asking themselves if they are becom-
ing addicted (Monacis et al., 2017; Karaiskos et al., 2010). This is why Malin
argues that we need to be concerned with the “systems of emotional dispositions”
(2014, p. 248) that surround living in technologically-mediated worlds. To focus
only on physiology is to miss the active role of cultural knowledge in the emer-
gence of emotional experience. Physiology does not operate in a vacuum.
Psychophysiological approaches have been a prominent part of the history
of the psychology of emotion. As psychology was taking shape as an experi-
mental discipline, the observable nature of much psychophysiological data was
a keen attraction. The preceding work in laboratories such as Wundt’s had also
attempted to develop experimental evidence of emotion, but its method of intro-
spection and more complex theory of emotion did not so readily fit a scien-
tific approach in the same way the psychophysiology of “emotional expression”
research did. This led to a selective model and understanding of the psychol-
ogy of emotion to develop throughout the 20th century – which had its roots in
Darwin’s (1965) work on emotional expression – and was developed through the
facial expression work of Ekman during the middle half of the century (Ekman,
Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969; Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Ekman et al., 1987). The
pre-20th century work attempting to articulate the multiple psychological pro-
cesses associated with emotion was gradually lost from mainstream research.
This included work exploring what distinctions exist between different emotion-
related terms and associated experiences, e.g. affect, passion, sentiment, will,
and feeling. Subjecting any or all of these to experimental scrutiny was difficult
(Ruckmick, 1936), and the desire for observable data for experimental studies
meant models based on facial or bodily expressions came to the fore. To some
extent, this has not changed to this day, e.g. use of AI-technologies such as face
and body recognition technologies.
The early psychological studies of emotion were attempting to empirically
describe something of emotional experience. It was widely held that awareness of
what emotional experience felt like existed, due to everyone having such experi-
ences, but developing a definition which can be operationalised was far more
difficult (Ruckmick, 1936). The methods and technologies of the experimental
studies used came to help shape the definitions and understandings that emerged.
For instance, the desire for observable data led to studies and models based on
various bodily expressions to predominate. The more nuanced studies of Wundt,
in which he tried to operationalise studies providing insight into subjective emo-
tional experience in all its thickness, gradually fell by the wayside, as expression-
based studies surged ahead. This did not entirely eradicate the problem of a lack
of a unified definition of emotion upon which to develop studies. Indeed, there
was not even a unified terminology to draw upon, with multiple terms used.
Digital versions of emotion

The lack of an agreed upon universal definition of emotion persists to this day
(Greco & Stenner, 2008). This has led some scholars to not think of emotions
as defined aetiological entities, but to consider the individual, social and cultural
practices through which knowledge (and subsequently experiences) of emotions
emerge. Such a move is premised on the argument that we do not assume a dis-
crete set of emotions existing outside of the practices through which they come
to be expressed and understood (Ellis & Tucker, 2015). While everyone knows
emotion in terms of their own feelings and experiences, knowledge and under-
standing of emotion are produced through practices that involve discourses, tech-
nologies, and bodies intersecting. The philosopher of science, Vinciane Despret
(2004), points to this as a paradox. Bodies have intimate knowledge of emotion,
and yet, academically, we exist with multiple ideas and forms of knowledge
of what emotion is and how it operates. The question then becomes, how have
existing theories and categories come to be; what are/were the theoretical and
empirical conditions that translated research data into established models, and
what are the implications of said models? Despret offers the concept of version to
frame a practice-based analysis of emotion, which focuses on context dependency
rather than universality. Despret acknowledges the diversity of understandings
and models of emotion and explores how different versions have emerged, e.g.
through the scientific endeavours of psychology. Despret uses the term version as
a way of keeping open to analysis the multiplicity of theories and models of emo-
tion; version “always relates back to multiplicity and keeps the existence of other
versions in mind” (p. 23). Despret’s approach does not prioritise one version over
others. Indeed, it relies on the other versions, as they become knowledge-variants
of emotion that any given version is known in relation to, e.g. basic emotion mod-
els can be critiqued with sociological accounts.
Despret was concerned with the psychologisation of emotion through experi-
mental research during the second half of the 20th century. How did emotion
come to be configured and translated in psychological laboratories in such a way
to produce findings that led to specific psychological categories of emotion?
Moreover, how do these fit into the broader suite of emotional theories in the
social sciences and philosophy? Despret acknowledges the prominence of psy-
chology as the scientific discipline of emotion, and as such, the primary power
in terms of cultural and academic knowledge of emotion (which, for centuries
beforehand, had been the remit of philosophy). For example, the social psycho-
logical experiments conducted by Richard Lazarus. By introducing multiple vari-
ables in his experiment, Lazarus introduces several social elements, in the form of
culturally-defined values, that frame the social situations that shape the responses
of participants. Despret discusses Lazarus’s experiment involving participants
viewing a film depicting an Australian Aboriginal circumcision ceremony. The
experiment involved three groups, each viewing the film with a different com-
mentary; one explaining the surgical procedure in detail (“traumatic” commen-
tary); one emphasising how the ceremony is seen as a “joyful” experience; and
the final one without commentary. Lazarus claims that the emotional intensity of
the experiment was highest for those hearing the “traumatic” commentary. This
led to Lazarus claiming that participants’ (cognitive) evaluation of an event plays
a significant role in emotional events. The point Despret makes is that evaluations
in the experimental setting are shaped by participants’ social and cultural experi-
ence (e.g. values and beliefs). Evaluations are not made in isolation but relate
to a set of wider considerations and encultured experiences. As such, the evalu-
ations made by participants in Lazarus’s experiment are, in effect, social ones,
and inform as much to the importance of culture to emotion as they do cognition.
To understand them, one needs to understand the participants’ psychological and
social experience.
For Despret, emotion comes to signal something about the relationship an
individual has with the world. The focus becomes on the nature of these rela-
tionships, e.g. whether emotion indicates “agreement or disagreement with the
world” (2004, p. 178). In this view, the function of emotion is to inform and
provide insight regarding an individuals’ relationship with their social and cul-
tural environments. This socialising of emotion was the translation of emotion
enacted by the social psychology experiments of Lazarus. This is a relational
theory in terms of a psychological version of emotion seen as intrinsically linked
to the social environment. These are not theoretically framed as separate entities,
but as existing on a continuum – as connected. Emotion is accordingly consid-
ered as the manifestation of processes that involve psychological AND social
dimensions. Social psychology not only translated emotion into social events in
the experimental setting, but as subsequently having a social life in the form of
becoming categories by which people come to interpret their own experiences.
Models emerging from experimental settings come to be ways for people to
understand themselves. Despret extends this point by analysing William James’s
theory of emotion – a founding theory of psychology. In “suggesting another
way of reading our emotions, James induces a new experience of them, that is to
say, a new experience with emotion and, from that moment on, a new emotional
experience with the world, another way of affecting oneself and of letting oneself
be affected” (Despret, 2004, p. 203). What kind of “new experiences” of our emo-
tions are made possible in a digital age?
Despret’s concept of version renders emotion as cultural products. This pro-
vides a historical context to emotion categories, with certain emotions in the past
no longer existing, e.g. melancholia was a common emotional disposition during
the medieval period, but largely disappeared in 20th-century psychiatric termi-
nology – to be replaced by depression. This is not a form of relativism, in terms
of arguing that the experiences categorised as melancholia no longer exist, but
rather, a different system of knowledge exists to which they are subject. Another
example of this temporal contingency is the fact that the word emotion did not
exist until the 19th century (Dixon, 2003), preceded by a terminology of the pas-
sions. Emotions become cultural products that contribute to the constitution of the
historical period of the time and operate in relational processes between bodies
and cultural practices of knowledge production (e.g. psychological experience).
A consequence of this is that “emotions disappear when they no longer have a
world in which to grow, while others are transformed when the world changes”
(Despret, 2004, p. 187). The current book is one attempt to track the transfor-
mation of emotion as the world changes through mass digitisation. What does
digitisation do to emotion? Which existing models of emotion are brought to the
fore by digital research and practice? Are new emotion categories emerging due
to digitisation of life? These will come to be the forms of emotional knowledge
that feed into individual embodied knowledge and become the ways people come
to interpret their own emotional experiences.
Version is a form of critique grounded in practice that does not result in judg-
ing different models against each other in terms of arguing which is best, but a
way of keeping all as part of the reflective practice of understanding the range of
emotional knowledge that exists. In an area as broad as emotion and affect, we
think this is a valuable move, and it is one we aim to use as a directive throughout
the book. This openness to analysis is useful for tracking emotion in a digital age,
given the scope of the area, i.e. the spread of the digital into most areas of life.
Throughout this book, we aim to remain “open” to the multiplicity of theories of
emotion across the physical and social sciences, philosophy, science and technol-
ogy studies, and cultural studies.
An additional contribution of thinking in terms of versions is the acknowl-
edgement of the enacting of emotions in situation-specific ways. It does not
suggest that different versions relate to the taking of multiple perspectives (e.g.
psychological, sociological, biological) on a single emotional form. This would
be a nod to multi-disciplinarity, but one underpinned by a reification of emo-
tion. Instead, versions theoretically attend to emotion as enacted by the knowl-
edge practices that claim to explain them. Despret captures this perfectly when
stating “[v]ersion makes the world exist in a possible manner” (2004, p. 31).
The development of theories based on bodily expressions of emotion is a key
example of this, for instance, the (re)newed focus on psychophysiology shoring
up psychological models under threat of seeming out of date (e.g. those which
rely heavily on Ekman’s Basic Emotion Model). A formal distinction between
the practices we focus on and the knowledges we develop about them emerges,
which has implications for notions of authenticity that are important in theories
of emotion. For instance, attempts to develop forms of “artificial emotion” based
on machine learning rely heavily on a claim to authenticity through machine read-
able physiological activity. Technologies are imbued with the capacity to bypass
“inauthentic” consciousness of emotion by providing direct recognition of emo-
tion expressed physiologically. Thinking in terms of a range of socio-material
practices enacting multiple versions of emotion troubles this, as it does not rely on
a notion of authenticity, which itself requires the possibility of being inauthentic
to position itself against. This is an important move, as notions of authenticity are
often important pillars of technological uses of emotion. They also threaten to
simplify the knowledge produced, as they reduce the density of lived experience
to a layer of psychophysiological expression. For instance, even if we were to
accept the view that an emotion, such as anger, can be universally recognised, this
does not mean that it is experienced in a universal way. Recognition can inform
as to what emotion is present, but it does not explain how or why it emerges in
each situation. An approach is needed that can speak to recognition, experience,
and context dependency.
In the chapters that follow, we analyse different versions of emotion at work in
the areas of artificial intelligence, social media, digital mental health, and surveil-
lance. In relation to existing theory and literature, analysing emotion and affect
in a digital age means covering the range of emotion models that underpin tech-
nological attempts to capture, read, and mimic emotion (e.g. AI), as well as the
broader emotional implications of living in societies with greater digital presence.
The chapters will adopt a similar structure. First, each chapter details the theory
of emotion that is being recruited to underpin the technological development (e.g.
emotion-related AI, social media). Then, we analyse what is enhanced, disrupted,
and developed in terms of emotion by the technology, and finally, we describe
the emotional implications of “living with” the technology. Emotion is at stake in
multiple ways in relation to digital technologies, and it is important to articulate
the multiplicities that emerge. We are not focused on defining a unified emotion,
but rather on tracking and revealing the relational stakes at play in the emergence
and operation of emotion in a digital age. In doing this, we are leaning towards
approaches whose unit of analysis extends beyond the individual body (be it in
relation to physiology, neurology, or cognition). One of the motivations for writ-
ing this book is the belief that emotion and affect are central to understanding
life in a digital age, beyond their presence in specific body-technology relations.
Part of developing understanding is about focusing on technologies not just in
terms of their functional design, but also the broader impact of their use, e.g. how
people feel when they realise that they are subject to covert face-recognition. This
is about considering emotion and affect as agents of functionality in terms of the
relations we have with our bodies and those of others that underpin psychological
and social life. The aim of the current book is to gain insight into how such pro-
cesses are being altered and (re)configured in and through the mediating practices
of digital technologies.
Affective living with digital technologies
The approach of Despret encourages us to think of technologies not just as tools
with which to discover emotional facts, but as agents that come to co-consti-
tute social and psychological life. This shifts attention away from thinking about
WHAT emotion is in a digital age to think about HOW different versions are
enacted in relations between human bodies and technologies. This book aims to
analyse emotion in relation to technologies, such as machine reading of bodily
expressions and sentiment analysis, through to a broader analysis of the affective
implications of living in environments subject to greater use of emotion-related
technologies. The relational approach developed looks at what kinds of practices
are enacted by new technologies. We are not only focused on understanding the
models and theories of emotion that underpin new emotion-related technologies,
but also the emotional impact of living in social worlds subject to their greater
use. This involves extending the unit of emotional analysis to incorporate the
social, relational, and cultural layers of emotional activity. Emotion is not only
the result of physiological pressures, but also flows through relationships across
life (e.g. personal, professional) and comes to shape the relations we have with
the material objects with which we live (Miller, 2008). This aligns with social
scientific thinking of emotion operating not just at a cognitive and/or psycho-
physiological level, but also as a wider relational force that can shape bodies
from outside (Brown et al., 2019; Tucker, 2006). This includes classic literature,
such as Hochschild’s (2012) sociology of emotions, to theories emerging from
social psychology, human geography, and cultural studies. No single unified con-
cept of “relational emotion” or affect exists. One attempt to capture the range
of existing theory led Gregg & Seigworth (2009) to offer eight strands of affect
theory, which they front up as being “by no means fully comprehensive” (p. 8).
For Stenner (2017), there are three main strands: Work in queer studies influenced
by Eve Sedgwick; psychoanalytically informed psychosocial theories; and work
in cultural studies and critical theory drawing on the writings of Spinoza and
Deleuze (e.g. with Massumi (1996) being a key exemplar). Additionally, affect
has supplemented existing concepts, highlighting the indeterminacy of forces
shaping spaces and environments, e.g. affective atmospheres (Ash, 2013; Bille,
Bjerregaard, & Sorenson, 2015; Bissell, 2010; Ellis et al., 2013) and affective
assemblages (Anderson & McFarlane, 2011; Duff, 2014; Marcus & Saka, 2006;
Sampson, 2017). Here, the distinction between emotion and affect features, as
it has throughout historical accounts, with non-individualistic accounts often
developing theories of affect rather than emotion (Ahmed, 2004; Anderson, 2006;
Gregg & Seigworth, 2009; Tucker, 2011; 2013).
It is the third strand that has catalysed theories of affect as grounded in embod-
ied experience without reducing it to a set of internal processes. This has been
particularly prominent in critical social psychology, human geography, and cul-
tural studies (Ellis & Tucker, 2015). The attraction of Spinoza’s thinking, both in
its original form and as articulated through a Deleuzian lens, centres on his argu-
ment that bodies should not be understood in a vacuum, but only as the relations
with other objects through which they come to be. Spinoza’s affect is immedi-
ately non-reductionist and in essence, a social account of the operation of bodies.
To understand the powers and capacities of an individual body, one needs to
extend the unit of analysis to map the other bodies interacted with. For Spinoza,
relations operate as the movement of power, rendering one body in a relation
more powerful and one less. To understand a body, one needs to understand the
extent of its capacity to act, namely what it can “do” and how this is determined
through relations with other bodies. This immediately takes effect outside of the
body, which differs from Bergson’s (1988) concept of affectivity as the unique
way we know our bodies from within, rather than from without, as per other
bodies. Deleuze used Spinoza’s concept of affect as a jumping off point for his
own writings on affect as the motions of a body-in-process, operating through
multiple connections with other human and non-human bodies, potentialised for
new relations to emerge, and not driven by an internal set of functions whose
properties remain consistent over time and space. Moreover, relations are not dis-
cretely located, but extend across the porous boundaries that are commonly taken
to define individual bodies (e.g. the skin). Affect is used to name the movement
of forces through the body and, by consequence, is not adequately understood
by traditional notions of interiority and exteriority (i.e. affect is not thought to be
contained within the body). A topological analysis develops, as the movement of
affect is not dependent on a geometric sense of scale and space, but a more fluid,
malleable spatial understanding of relationality. For instance, one can feel closer
to a friend on the other side of the world, when interacting via social media, than
to a stranger we sit next to on a bus. Distance and proximity are not primary in a
topological sense of affect.
The relational thinking that underpins Deleuzian-influenced theories of affect
means not just focusing on processes at work inside the body, be it the feelings
of psychophysiological activity and/or their associated cognitions, but rather, to
think of emotion as one part of a broader system of affect that is not depend-
ent on the notion of an individual body to explain it. Instead, it brings in the
wider array of objects and subjects that constitute our social worlds, including
discourses, spaces, technologies, and their intersectionality. No single object is
rendered primary or analysable in a vacuum. Accordingly, to understand an indi-
vidual, one needs to analyse the system (or space) of relations through which it
takes life. Relations emerge, not individual beings and objects. Analysis needs to
attend to the ways that relations emerge and come to be, not their finished form.
What is taken as the psychological expands beyond the individual body, as any
part of a relation can take psychological form (whether it is internal or external
to the body). This attaches potential affective weight to non-human objects and
materiality, such as digital technologies. This is not to suggest that technologies
have emotional attributes (although, in his later writing, Deleuze, with Guattari,
suggested that works of art have affect [1994]), but that they are elements and
dimensions of relations that originate and propagate emotion. Deleuzian notions
of affect have featured in analysis of young people and education (Ringrose,
2011); mental health spaces (McGrath & Reavey, 2015; 2016, Duff, 2011; 2014);
vital memory (Brown & Reavey, 2015); and more. The notions of relational and
inter-connected affect align well with the questions regarding emotional life in a
digital age. The extent of digital technologies’ elicitation, capture, and propaga-
tion of data is blurring traditional notions of interiority, exteriority, individuality,
and collectivity. For instance, the incessant absorption of data into systems of big
data, in which a notion of individual data disappears.
Existing writing on affect as a relational force in the emergence of emotion
and embodied experience has been broad in focus, and as such, has not always
directly attended to specific relations between bodies and technology, although
examples that have include Hillis, Paasonen, & Petit (2015) on networked affect
and Coleman (2018) on structures of feeling. A specific relational affective con-
ceptualisation of the co-operation of bodies and technologies did emerge in the
mid-20th century writings of philosopher and psychologist Gilbert Simondon.
The lack of English translations of Simondon’s work has contributed to its under-
representation in the philosophical resources drawn upon in affect studies, criti-
cal theory, and the social sciences more generally (Deleuze’s work is far more
prominent). For Simondon, relationality does not involve highlighting the rela-
tions between existing individual forms but rather, names the process through
which objects and subjects come to exist and operate. Relationality is central to
the concept of individuation, which Simondon develops as a move away from a
philosophy premised on the idea of a world constituted by the relations between
separated forms and substances. Instead, it is the emergence of individual forms
as part of systems of relations that take priority. Simondon rails against the phi-
losophy of hylomorphism that permeated mid-20th century cybernetics, framing
information as the mechanism of communicating a signal between sender and
receiver. For Simondon, the cybernetic version of information did not inform as
to the role of information in the genesis of new relations through which individual
objects and subjects come into being. Information is a more powerful agent for
Simondon than for the cyberneticists. For Simondon, the key is not to think of
information as substance, as somehow existing outside of, or on the periphery of
life processes/events, but to think of it as structuring, not a structure itself (Iliadis,
2013). This was a radical departure from the cybernetic thinking of the mid-20th
century. Simondon’s concept of information is part of his broader philosophy of
individuation, in which he departs from the Aristotelian position of distinguishing
between form and matter as distinct properties of substances (hylomorphism).
For Simondon, form cannot be separated from matter within a substance. For
instance, in relation to the human body, Simondon argues that sensation does
not exist separately from matter. There is no existing category outside of matter
where sensation resides, awaiting the form-givingness of matter. Substances as
forms emerge through processes in which no distinction is present (Iliadis, 2013).
Simondon was focused on the emergence of individual forms, but through a phi-
losophy that does not rely on identifying a set of inherent properties that underpin
the operation of a given form.
Attending to the processes of genesis and formation of human and technologi-
cal life is as important now as it was during the early days of computation and
cybernetics that influenced Simondon. He is arguably one of the most important
thinkers of human-technological life and was a key influence on later thinkers
such as Gilles Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler. His is a psycho-social approach
(Simondon’s approach is typically referred to as a hyphenated ‘psycho-social’
rather than the non-hyphenated version common in contemporary psychosocial
theory), in which psychological and social/collective dimensions are intrinsically
linked as co-emergent parts of a singular process of individuation. What he refers
to as psychic and collective are not distinct forms that communicate through infor-
mation, but rather they are in-formed; information is the mode of emergence they
take. In arguing for an anti-substantialist position, Simondon faced the problem of
how to articulate the nature of the psychological individual, the pillar of so much
philosophical thought. How to think of psyche and collective without referring
to an additional substance that somehow gives them form? To avoid recourse to
substantiality, Simondon thinks of psychic-collective individuation as a continu-
ation of pre-individuation. This allows him to conceptualise the psychological
individual without separating it from other dimensions of emergence and social-
ity. If what he referred to as the psychic individual is truly individual, then it is
rendered a separate substance to social/collective life. Simondon’s answer to this
problem was the concept of individuation, with the psychological individual an
always-connected dimension of the process of individuation, without developing
into a separate substantial being.
In effect, Simondon moves the analytic unit back from individual bodies to a
preindividual realm of potentialised energy. Its creative potential conceptually
requires it to exceed the individual (human and non-human forms). The process
of individuation operates as a genesis of relationality, which means that an indi-
vidual being (e.g. a human body) is seen as always-already part of a relational
operation and emergence. This means that “psychic life” is not just the interior
life of the individual (as a substantial form). It is the interior part of a set of rela-
tions. Psychic reality is not closed in a substantialist way but is open in a relational
form. But what does being open mean; what is an individual open to? This is
the next consequence of Simondon’s anti-substantialism. If the individual body
is not substantially different to the collective, then this means that it must carry
something of the collective (preindividual) with it as an ever-present companion
in the activity of living. Therefore, Simondon talks of psychic and collective indi-
viduation as a singular process. Individual bodies are psychic AND collective
simultaneously; both are dimensions of a body’s existence.
This raises questions for how we understand activity that is traditionally thought
to operate internally, e.g. personal emotions. If forms are not given but operate as
relational becomings, it means that what is perceived as individual life cannot be
entirely sustained and “resolved” internally. This is because individual beings are
not only individual, but also are partially collective. As such, individual bodies
operate and exist through ongoing orientations to themselves as individual bodies
(psychic individuation) as well as to the collective world (collective individu-
ation). It is these relations that “structure the individual” (Keating, 2019, p. 7).
Analysis is ontogenetically at the level of the emergence of relations that come to
structure individual bodies. This provides a deep and significant relation between
“interiority” and “exteriority”, as they become two dimensions of dynamic pro-
cesses of individuation through which individuals come into being. An individual
living being is required to orient to both itself and to its external environment; it
has a dual-aspect dynamic being. It is here that Simondon’s concept of affectivity
works to define the psychological reality of individuation.
Affectivity is the activity of living as a psycho-social being facing the ongo-
ing problem of orienting to oneself (interiority) and to the collective (exteriority)
simultaneously. Simondon shows us that our individual being is not reducible to
ourselves as individuals, because our ongoing being is constituted by individual
AND collective dimensions. Indeed, the genesis of our emergence is structured
through relations. Affectivity is not about the relations we, as pre-constituted indi-
vidual bodies, have with our surrounding environments. Individual and environ-
ment are not two substantial domains that exist independently and communicate
as distinct beings. Affect designates the way social and individual life emerges AS
relations (Combes, 2012). It is through affect that Simondon claims that individ-
ual being is “divided” (or polarised) through the double orientation to interiority
and exteriority. Simondon’s theory of affect relates to theories that situate affect
as non-conscious, as he states that the division that affect signifies occurs prior to
perception, and as such, constitutes a more general relation, akin to Whitehead’s
(1985) notion of feeling as the core aspect of relationality of all objects and enti-
ties. Simondon, though, does offer a specificity with his concept of affect as a
core part of the genesis of living beings, which can be psychologised. Affect oper-
ates as a vital part of the emergence and operation of individual psychological
beings. Crucially, this does not mean psychological life is bounded and distinct
from exterior “social” life but rather, is an integrated dimension of processes of
individuation.
Consider the following thought experiment regarding relationality:
You enter a busy train carriage with all the seats taken apart from one. You
sit in the vacant seat and start reading a book. Your experience is as an indi-
vidual in a train carriage with multiple other bodies. There is nothing unto-
ward about your experience. Several stops later your attention is drawn away
from the book to the carriage, and you notice that all, bar one person, has
disembarked. Your experience of the space of the carriage has changed. The
one remaining person is sitting immediately next to you. What felt perfectly
normal when you sat down, now feels strange. Being so close to another
person in an otherwise empty carriage feels like an enforced intimacy that is
disconcerting. You want to get up and move to another seat but are concerned
that this will make your feeling of discomfort visible to the other passenger.
In this example, nothing has changed in your position, or that of the remaining
passenger. What has changed is the relation with the other passengers. In a full
carriage it feels perfectly okay to sit immediately next to another person. In a near
empty carriage, it feels strange. The experience is entirely relational and changes
despite your body remaining static and unmoved. It is the change in the relations
with other passengers that alters your experience. The feeling of that situation
is fundamentally relational. Moreover, it is that way for both passengers in this
example. You are part of the collective for the remaining passenger, who now also
potentially feels awkward at the transformed sense of proximity once the carriage
emptied. Each body is simultaneously individual and collective.
Simondon’s relational approach distinguishes him from subsequent philoso-
phers of technology. For instance, Stiegler (1998) sees technics as “processes of
exteriorisation” (p. 17). This prioritises the human individual through claiming
that technologies draw out interiorised psychological processes, such as memory
(e.g. technology reduce the need for memory, because things can be recorded by
technologies rather than relying purely on cognition). For Stiegler, technologies
extend human processes beyond the flesh and bones of the body to the informa-
tional realms of technologies. Simondon does not prioritise the human (psycho-
logical) in such a way, as for him, life is always-already human and technological.
Emotion operates as the next ontogenetic step, it works “on” preceding affects in
the formation of more structured and conscious orientations of the relations of an
individual being to itself and its environment. It is a structuring process that situ-
ates the individual in a more consciously meaningful way with its environment.
Here, the environment is not taken in a general sense but rather, as the immedi-
ate and local milieu with which the living being individuates. What we think of
as a psychological subject “can then be conceived of as the unity of being as an
individuated living being, and as a being that represents its actions through the
world to itself as an element and as a dimension of the world” (Simondon, 2009,
p. 8). Individual bodies come into being as part of relations with elements that
constitute the milieu. This is not about the psychological and social as distinct
realms, but the milieu as a more expanded unit of analysis that does not reduce
the operation and becoming of individual beings to their bodies (human and non-
human). The individual is therefore fundamentally about a relation within and a
relation without. These are not sequential but are simultaneous and involve action.
The individual subject is an agent of its own individuation in terms of intervening
in the problem of its own existence. Simondon’s theory of pre-individuation and
affect shift thinking away from constituted living beings towards the stage of their
genesis. This involves thinking prior to the formation of individual emotional
beings.
Individuation and data

The setting of the analytic unit prior to the constitution of individuals speaks to
the reality of life in a digital age. Bodies and data form new relations of individu-
ality and collectivity. Data generated from and by bodily activity form the bulg-
ing databases as/of collectivity. There are multiple relationships at work between
bodies and digital technologies, from creating new ways of connecting to our
pasts, allowing us to follow very closely the day to day activities of family and
friends, to becoming aware (or possibly not) about processes of commodification
of our personal lives, friendships, and relationships. Core to these processes is
data and how to conceptualise the impact of mass generation of data associated
with the activity and motion of individual bodies. Attempts to conceptualise data
subjects are emerging in response to mass datafication. For example, Goriunova
(2019) suggests that data are not representative of bodies; their content and activ-
ity cannot be reduced in entirety to the bodily activity from which they were
generated. This notion troubles concepts such as data traces and data doubles
that rely on an established identified self to be traces and doubles of (data doubles
are discussed in more detail in Chapter Six). If data are not representative, then
what are they, and how should (and do) we relate to them? Data can be multiple,
as can bodies, which means that two systems or multiplicity co-exist. Data can
exist and operate in a range of different systems. Shopping loyalty schemes cre-
ate data relating to our grocery purchases; travel companies create data about the
journeys we take; insurance companies create data about where we live and the
type of accommodation we live within; mortgage companies create data about
income and marital status; schools create data about parents’ place of work and
phone numbers; mobile phone companies create data about where we carry and
use mobile devices. These are fragments of data that relate to the activities and
movement of bodies but are often considered as unifying in relation to an indi-
vidual living body. In attempting to conceptualise the digital subject, Goriunova
(2019) draws attention to the inherent complexity of the computational practices
underpinning the data ecosystems that feed on the activities of individual bodies.
Instead of thinking of a unified singular entity (akin to a data double) “the digital
subject is in fact a set of dynamic processes that have the structures of compu-
tational actions, models, and socio-political cultures. It is a process in which no
exact or stable state is significant or valuable; what matters is the algorithmic
interpretation at the moments data can be used, sold, or otherwise acted upon” (p.
132). What matters, for Goriunova, is what has value. This could be commercial
value for a retailer in the case of a loyalty shopping scheme, or health and safety
value in the case of a school recording parents’ place of work and contact details.
Moreover, data must work algorithmically. They need to operate in a computa-
tional system that has clear objectives. This troubles the idea that the design and
operation of data ecosystems relate to the activity and experiences of a unified
singular subject. The lived body and data can be thought to operate as distinct,
albeit related, systems of reality. Data are not straightforwardly representative of
the body. For Goriunova, this creates a distance (rather than a relation) that con-
stitutes the digital subject, which is neither a representation nor a discrete subject
in the classical sense. This is not a distance created by mass digitisation. It could
have been said to exist in pre-digital times that were also subject to attempts to
represent the body through media (e.g. letters, telegrams, etc.). Datafication has,
though, created a new intensity to the distance between bodies and data. This
distance can be thought of as part of a process of individuation, in which data =
collective and body = individual. To follow Goriunova, data make new forms of
individuation possible (e.g. digital subjects).
Data can, consequently, be thought to operate as a realm of (preindividual)
potentialised action in terms of enacting current and future individual forms of
bodily activity and experience. Moreover, bodies carry part of future collectives,
in terms of the continual generation of data that their activity facilitates when inter-
acting with digital technologies. The non-representational distance Goriunova
discusses can be (re)configured as part of Simondon’s dual dimension individual-
collective system of reality. While Goriunova’s argument hinges on a notion of
the digital subject, our analysis concentrates on the emotional dynamics of body-
technology assemblages that operate non-reductively and non-representationally.
For instance, what does the data generated by a face recognition camera tell us
about the emotional experience of a body? Does the fact that a smile is expressed
reliably indicate happiness? Could the person be masking another emotion for
fear of upsetting their interlocutor? Our digital environments have created new
forms of individuality and collectivity through the movement of data. Concerns
about privacy and the ethics of data capture have emerged in response to the ways
that bodies connect to myriad other objects through data. For instance, communi-
cating with a friend through social media feels personal and individual, and yet,
in doing so, data is contributing to the social media’s (collective) database to be
profiled and used for advertising. Individuality cannot operate without collectivity
(through data). As such, we can think of data as part of the process of individu-
ation through which individual bodies are continually presented with and which
exist as a form of potential tension. Data come to act as part of the collective
part of the dual-aspect psychic AND collective individuation through which bod-
ies emerge and operate in life. It is this reality that we seek to explore throughout
the book.
Simondon offers a valuable contribution at this stage because he spoke about
affect as a core part of the process of individuation, incorporating a psychologi-
cal point of view, as part of the relational and processual becoming of individual
body-technology forms. This speaks to core concerns of this book, namely what
kind of relational forms are emerging between bodies and digital technologies in
our data-rich social worlds and how emotional and affective life are implicated in
such processes. This develops the non-determinist and non-essentialist approach
we stated as an aim in the introduction. Simondon’s concept of affect does not
relate to, nor inform, a categorical account of emotion. Nor does it enlighten cul-
tural understandings of the meaning-making through language of emotion catego-
ries. What it does do is place affect at the centre of the emergence, operation, and
motions of psychosocial life as a body in the world.
Digitally mediated processes of emotion and affect

The psychosocial approach developed throughout the book is premised on the
idea of emotional and affective life being subject to specific digital interventions,
as well as part of the relational emergence of bodies that are simultaneously indi-
vidual and collective. The range and extent of interaction with digitisation varies
and depends on our place in the world and the spaces and places we inhabit. For
instance, the opening of the next chapter highlights the use of face-recognition
AI in border control. This is something we have limited control over, should we
decide to travel (or be required/forced to). Alternatively, for many people, the
digital elements of the relations through which we exist and operate are the eve-
ryday technologies of social media and the internet. The potential for interacting
with digital activity of some sort is significant. Key to understanding their impact
is developing a non-reductionist and non-substantialist approach that does not
focus solely on the digital as the primary force, nor rely on an essentialist view
that digital and human are two pre-existing domains of activity communicating
via information. Digital activity is being absorbed into existing practices and rela-
tionships (e.g. family message groups) as well as creating new ones (e.g. political
arguments on Twitter).
The subsequent chapters are informed by the theoretical discussion in this
chapter, to analyse the specific models and approaches to emotion in key areas
of digital life. There are, of course, many areas that constitute digital life, and
we have chosen a selection we think are important, namely artificial intelligence;
social media; digital mental health; and surveillance. Each chapter demonstrates
how emotional and affective life is implicated and operates in potentially multiple
ways, including the models that underpin each area and their subsequent broader
emotional impact on psychological and social life. Key to our approach is under-
standing that living in digitally mediated environments involves relations that are
not static and fixed, but that emerge through processes that are multiplex and
contingent. Emotion is not only operating at a psychophysiological level, but also
through the objects, texts, and images that constitute our social worlds. Digital
networks operate through the generation of data through images, text, and sounds
(e.g. emojis, gifs). A mass materialisation of emotion and affect is underway,
which, while not completely new, is creating new ways of connecting and inter-
acting with ourselves and others. For instance, specialist apps designed to support
people experiencing mental distress are creating new ways of understanding and
relating to our bodies. Social media are producing archives in which the present
is not forgotten but is available in perpetuity to be scrolled through and accessed.
This stored sociality is previously only possible through technologies such as
photographs and home video recordings. These archives are not just available for
individual users, but to be commodified for the commercial interests of the social
media providers.
Technologies are not solely tools for human use, but also cultural artefacts.
In contemporary social worlds, digital technologies are very much part of the
cultural consciousness, with frequent claims as to their impact on the world (e.g.
social media and young people’s mental health). This has an emotional impact
on life as well. Digital activity enacts new processes of individuation, with affect
orienting bodies to these new dimensions. Artificial intelligence and machine
learning are being designed and deployed in several areas, from retail to national
security, with many more promised to come. The rise of social media in the previ-
ous 10–15 years has been exponential, with billions of worldwide users under-
taking their daily lives in concert with social media platforms. Mental health
support is rapidly exploring the potential to develop new digital forms of sup-
port, which can be less expensive and more accessible than in-person services.
Finally, the scope of data collection and storage that these digital media hold
presents numerous opportunities for surveillance, not just in the traditional sense
of CCTV, but the monitoring of personal data and information (so-called data or
digital surveillance). These digital technologies are mediating the relations people
have with themselves as individual bodies and with the environment around them.
Emotion and affect are implicated in the emergence, operation, and anticipatory
form motional relations take. Bodies move in concert with a variety of digital
technologies designed to monitor and capture data about emotion. While these
need analysing in and of themselves, we also argue that the very relations through
which such body-technology patterns emerge can take affective form, which is
something not always considered in design.
This chapter acknowledges that the history of emotion is not unified, and as
such, contemporary emotion-related technologies do not stand on solid uncon-
tested foundations as to what emotion and affect are and how they should be stud-
ied. Analysis needs to consider what models and theories of emotion and affect
are at play and anticipated, in relation to digital technologies. Throughout the
book, we are driven by two main concerns: 1) To discuss existing theory and prac-
tice in relation to key areas pertaining to emotion in a digital age. This is important
to understand the theories of emotion that underpin technological developments
such as AI; 2) To frame emotion as central to the relationships we have to our-
selves and to the datafied world around us. This involves a broader concern about
the operation of individual and social life and the emotional dynamics of living
with data hungry technologies. Understanding emotion in a digital age requires
this dual approach. This is the Simondonian influence in terms of pre-individua-
tion. Bodies and technologies take form as part of processes, rather than emerging
from within each entity as distinct substances. Data, technologies, and bodies are
structuring dimensions of motional processes that come to constitute conscious
and non-conscious emotional and affective experience. What we feel as emotions
are actions that orient us to our own bodies and those of others (collectivity). The
category of relation is central to our discussions throughout the book. Much of
the content we cover focuses on emotion in an individualistic manner, as some-
thing residing and operating within the skin of the body. We seek to keep analysis
open to consider bodies as individual AND social. Not all the technologies we
discuss are in widespread use yet, so our analysis is in places anticipatory in terms
of considering their implications for future emotional life. Analysing through a
psycho-social lens involves incorporating a dimension of non-organic materiality
(Simondon’s sociality/collective); considering bodies as simultaneously organic
and non-organic. This concept of relationality is not entirely captured when think-
ing of individual (organic) and social (partially non-organic) as separate entities.
Instead, bodies can be thought of as carrying an element of non-organic life with
them, in terms of bodies being the source of a continual generation of data by
technologies (e.g. social media). It is the generation of data from bodily activity
regarding emotional and affective life that is the focus of this book. Bodies oper-
ate in almost constant contact with technologies. Data is generated from these
body-technology relations. This is not just the giving of data by bodies, nor the
taking of data by technologies. It operates relationally. Our aim throughout this
book is to explore the centrality of emotion and affect to relations between bodies
and digital technologies. We must consider the potential emotional and affective
impact of mass digitisation and datafication. This involves considering emotion,
not in terms of the feelings of an already constituted individual being, but as forms
of knowledge and experience enacted by social practices. Emotion and affect are
ways through which we relate to ourselves and to others. Digitisation and data-
fication are creating new ways of relating to ourselves and others and hence, are
impacting emotional and affective life. This is the underpinning principle of the
book. Not every digital and/or data practice we discuss focuses explicitly on emo-
tion, but, we argue, it has the current and future potential to be part of the emo-
tional and affective fabric of our social worlds.
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3 Artificial intelligence and emotion
Machine reading of emotion and affect

At the time of writing, a new European border patrol scheme has been announced,
using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify potential illegal immigrants at the bor-
der of Hungary, Latvia, and Greece. The iBorderCtrl scheme plans to use “smart”
lie-detection software, via an Avatar of a human border control officer, to analyse
the facial micro-expressions of those attempting to cross the border. The scheme
has been developed from a project that has received significant EU funding (ca.
4.5 million euro). The publication of this scheme has created much controversy
(Heaven, 2018). iBorderCtrl is one of the latest examples of the increased use of
AI designed to capture and label emotion through facial expressions. This “basic
emotion” model, initially developed by Darwin (2002) in 1872 in The Expression
of the Emotions in Man and Animals and later developed by Ekman (2004), sug-
gests that authentic emotions “leak” through micro facial expressions, outside
of an individual’s control. The lie detection software is based upon what the
producers call an aggregated risk-based approach. These forms of actuarial jus-
tice that utilise digitised data are becoming increasingly common within techno-
security systems (Hannah-Moffat, 2019). Digital technology is used to prevent
crime by aggregating markers associated with crime risk factors. In this instance,
emotion-based markers (so called micro-expressions), are part of an assemblage
of data, including fingerprints, palm vein recognition, face matching, and docu-
ment authenticity. The data are then run through the risk-based assessment tool
(RBAT) and, additionally, used to build up a database to help identify new algo-
rithms of risk.
The lie detector border control scheme relies on a model of emotion as iden-
tifiable through physiological expression (although the developers state a human
border guard is required to make the final decision). This relates to the history
of lie detection through a polygraph, meaning many-graphs or writings, as it is
used to monitor multiple bioregulatory modifications, namely pulse rate, respira-
tory rate, skin conductivity, and blood pulse. John A. Larson invented the poly-
graph, or what he termed the cardio-pneumo psychogram, in 1921, for criminal
investigatory purposes. He was the first American police officer to obtain an aca-
demic doctorate. Larson eventually realised that his invention was being used
in methodologically incorrect ways with negative consequences for criminal
Artificial intelligence and emotion 33
justice. Toward the end of his life he reportedly stated, “Beyond my expectation,
through uncontrollable factors, this scientific investigation became for practical
purposes a Frankenstein’s monster, which I have spent over 40 years in com-
bating” (Alder, 2009, p. 249). The polygraph has subsequently been extensively
used in lie detection activities; for example, in the USA, it has been used by
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National Security Agency (NSA),
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Los Angeles Police Department
(LAPD). Researchers, such as the National Research Council, continue to ques-
tion its efficacy, e.g. questioning whether the data interpretation is subjective and
idiosyncratic. Bruno Verschuere (with colleagues) suggests there is no scientific
basis for methods used for lie-detection (Goeleven et al., 2008; Meijer et al.,
2016; Verschuere et al., 2009) – work that led to him receiving the Ig Nobel
Prize in psychology – a so-called satiric prize, awarded to research that is unu-
sual and humorous, but assessed as offering significant insight for future research.
Similarly, as we will see throughout this chapter, emotion-related AI, or which
often features in the area of affective computing, has the potential to become a
Frankenstein monster if incorrectly used or misunderstood. Leys (2017) notes that
its popularity is largely down to its perceived objective approach to the study of
affects, bypassing the complications of cognition, consciousness, and subjectiv-
ity. This is very appealing to those in government and industry keen to use AI to
identify emotional activity and intention. Notwithstanding the significant politi-
cal and ethical problems of border patrol, the underlying science is questionable.
Additionally, it is well known in psychology that emotion is not easily separable
from subjectivity, consciousness, and cognition; it is not, as is often portrayed, an
extractable element. Emotional and affective life is not easily quantified for com-
putational use. Emotional and affective phenomena have evolved over millions of
years, and attempting to engineer them in machines is an extremely complex task,
particularly when many different definitions exist. Using emotion based micro-
expressions as a basis to automatically detect deception on EU borders may seem
like it is an efficient mechanism, however, many would argue that affect detection
technology is insufficiently developed, e.g. in relation to iBorderCtrl, it has been
claimed that “this implementation can lead to the implementation of a pseudosci-
entific border control” (Boffey, 2018).
This chapter explores the development of technologies using forms of AI in
emotion-related data (much of which has been developed in “affective comput-
ing”). Our focus is on the efforts made to try to track, identify, interpret, replicate,
and potentially manipulate emotional activity. AI has been associated with emo-
tion across media, the military, the state, private industries, and academia. The
discipline of affective computing has grown considerably in the last twenty years
and is now constituted by a range of areas. These include (but are not exhausted
by) capturing emotion through facial expression, bodily expression, speech, text,
physiological data such as skin conductance and heart rate, and senses such as
touch. Affective computing also involves areas focusing on affect generation,
such as in virtual characters and emojis and physical robots (informed by tech-
niques of labelling posture, gesture, and motion in dance) (Picard, 2000). Much
of this work aims to create “emotional agents” (virtual and/or physical) capable of
34 Artificial intelligence and emotion
social interaction with humans. Affective computing is a field of significant size
and growing influence, especially in industry. It remains a sub-field of engineer-
ing, though, which recruits existing models of emotion from psychology (primar-
ily) and the social sciences. As such, it is important to analyse the theories of
psychology that underpin the models that affective technologies develop and the
associated labelling of emotion therein.
The dawning of emotion-focused artificial intelligence

Accounts of AI permeate human history. They date from at least Homer’s Iliad,
in which we are told about robots made by the Greek god Hephaestos, right
up to contemporary science fiction. It was not until the 1940s that the goal of
what Pamela McCorduck (2004) called “the thinking machine” was becoming
realisable. Sedgwick and Frank (2003) define this time (from the late forties
to the mid-sixties) “the cybernetic fold”, wherein the development of compu-
tation was claimed to facilitate meaningful insight regarding the workings of
the brain. Computational approaches to human processes were, for a long time,
focused on intelligence as a rationalistic information-processing operation. This
was influential in the development of cognitive psychology, which used com-
putational models to conceptualise psychological processes, particularly intelli-
gence, memory, attention and perception. The importance of models of cognition
to the development of AI cannot be understated (Dreyfus, 1979). A reciprocal
relationship emerged in which models of computation influenced psychological
theories of cognition, which fed back into subsequent technological attempts to
understand intelligence. What is clear is that cognition, and a particularly ration-
alist version of it, constituted the model of psychology that computer science
drew upon in the design and development of what came to be known as artificial
intelligence.
Dreyfus offered a seminal critique of AI in his What Computers Can’t Do
(1979) and What Computers Still Can’t Do (1992), in which he argued that situ-
ational knowledge is core to intelligence. It is not just about knowledge operating
in a universal way across contexts, but about being aware of situational factors.
For Dreyfus, intelligence is context dependent, and computers cannot develop
situational knowledge. Human knowledge develops through a range of skills and
experiences. For Dreyfus:
our sense of our situation is determined by our changing moods, by our cur-
rent concerns and projects, by our long-range self-interpretation and probably
also by our sensory-motor skills for coping with objects and people-skills we
develop by practice without ever having to represent to ourselves our body
as an object, our culture as a set of beliefs, and our propensities as situation
→ action rules. All these unique human capacities provide a “richness” or
a “thickness” to our way of being-in-the-world and thus seem to play an
essential role in situatedness, which in turn underlies all intelligent behaviour
(1992, p. 53)
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invention which had failed to recommend itself to the particularity of
London.
“It may be all right,” she would say; “and so may the himage of a
piece of fat pork pulled up and down one’s throat with a string,
which, I am told, is hemployed at sea to encourage ’eaving. At the
same time, sir, I may venture to remark, that there are remedies
known to Londoners to be worse than their diseases.”
Uncle Jenico, in the first instance, secretly inveigled Fancy-Maria
into helping him in his experiment. The parlour fire was extinguished,
and the worthy girl despatched to the roof through a trap-door, where
she performed her share of the task with such inflexible tenacity that
when my uncle tugged at his end of the cord, which she had dutifully
lowered, he pulled her head into the chimney, and would have ended
by drawing her bodily down, I believe, if her gasps and chokings
reaching him below had not warned him in time. Then he slackened
his hold, and commended her excess of loyalty and instructed her
further; but in the end she descended from the roof an absolute
negress, and for days afterwards shed soot from her boots and
sneezed it from her hair in little clouds that flavoured everything.
Subsequently, Harry and I were taken into his confidence and
made his operators, much to our gratification. Climbing-boys, indeed!
It was become a luxury to be a sweep, thanks to Uncle Jenico; and
the world called him a crank! Every one but himself might profit by
his inventions. Certainly Harry and I did. We polished every flue in
Mrs. Puddephatt’s house as clean as a whistle, and, until we tired of
the sport, whatever other chimneys in the village the housewives
would lay open to us. And it was only when we took to angling with
the great sooty ball over parapets for unsuspecting faces pausing
below, that Mr. Sant, giving ear to furious complaints, stepped in with
his authority, and put an end to the game.
So, on us, black and joyous and inseparable, I will let down the
act-drop of our little stage, to raise it on a later development of the
drama I set out to record.
END OF PART I.
PART II.
CHAPTER I.
THE BADGER.
It is with an odd sense of nervousness, and almost of oppression,

that I open upon the second act of my story. In the first, the
schoolboy, with his “shining morning face” and serene
irresponsibility, had it all his own way. Now—an interval of five years
having been supposed, as the play-bills say, to elapse—the “shining
morning face” shows a little sobered, a little greyer in the dawn of
manhood, like a young moon in the dawn of day. We have not
eschewed adventure, Harry and I; only the spirit of it in us is
beginning to be tempered with a sense of moral obligations. We are
indulgent to the flippancies of youth but in so far as they do not
venture to presume upon our patronage. Only when alone together
do we relax our vigilance in the matter of what is due to ourselves
and our extremely incipient moustaches.
Harry, in short, takes up the tale at sixteen, and I at a few months
younger. The interval had served to shape us, I do believe, after a
manly enough model. We might have been “oppidans”—to put an
extreme case—at Eton, and had our characters stiffened, like cream,
by whipping, and have coursed hares, and drunk small-beer at the
Christopher, and enjoyed all the other social and educational
advantages which, according to the evidence put before the late
Commission, [Reported in 1864.] are peculiar to this seminary of the
gods, and not found in its Provost such a leader, counsellor and
noble confidant as little remote Dunberry was able to furnish us with
in the person of Mr. Sant. And this I say in no Pharisaic spirit of self-
satisfaction, but simply as a testimony to the qualities of this prince
among tutors, whom we loved and respected with the best reason in
the world.
Not much had figured to us, perhaps, during these five years
except the shapes of romance with which strong young souls can
always people a desert. We had put on mind and muscle. We could
run, swim, fight, eat anything that was set before us, and want more.
Our excursions were further afield; our walks more extended along
the road to Parnassus. We were very fine fellows, no doubt, in our
own opinions; and our voices were beginning to growl handsomely.
Harry had, for his part, developed into a shapely, fearless young
figure, with a good manner of speech and a great attachment to my
uncle. He had, moreover, developed a decided bent towards
mechanics, and went now on two days in the week to a technical
school in Yokestone, making the journey to and from on foot, and
sleeping each night with a cousin of his mother’s, who owned a small
foundry there, and who, since the boy’s proof of himself, had taken a
practical interest in his welfare. The periodic partings were without
savour to us, had it not been that to them the periodic reunions
supplied the salt. But no doubt they were helpful in giving us
opportunity for a more individually independent growth; and certainly
during them “Coke upon Littleton” (for Mr. Sant was training me with
an eye to the Law) secured my less divided attention.
As to Dunberry itself and its familiar figures, there was little change
to be noted. On the one side there was the ripening of the young fruit
towards maturity; on the other, a little whiter growth of lichen on the
decaying branches. Uncle Jenico must count among the latter;
though surely no tree past fruiting ever retained more unimpaired the
sweetness of its sap. He had collected during this period enough
antiquities to furnish out an old rag, bone, and iron shop; and,
indeed, I am afraid the bulk of his stock was not suited to a much
more exclusive repository. There was little which, provided it was
gathered from the beach and had once been a part of something
living or manufactured, he would not give a place in it. His veneration
for rust was the most artless thing. An object had only to be corroded
with it, to figure in his eyes for an assured antique. In this way he
amassed great quantities of bolts, links, sheet-iron fragments, and
other rarities, to most of which he assigned a use and period, which,
I am convinced, had never been theirs. There was, for instance, a
breastplate of the Renaissance era, which I do believe had never
been anything but a dish-cover of our own. There was an iron skull-
cap, or morion, of Edward the First’s time, which I will swear was
nothing but a saucepan without its handle; the handle itself, indeed,
being found near the same spot a few days later, and catalogued for
the head of a boar spear. Part of a whale’s under jaw, much
decayed, figured for the prow of a Viking ship; and divers teeth,
mostly, I think, horses’, for the grinders of prehistoric monsters.
There were some bronze coins certainly—none too many—whose
value was conjectural, and whose legends were largely
undecipherable. Uncle Jenico would never submit these, the cream
of his collection, to expert criticism. He hugged them as a miser hugs
his gold, but with a diviner intent. I alone was permitted to gloat with
him over the hoard.
“There’s your jointure, Dicky,” he would say. “Look at it
accumulating for you, without an effort of its own, at compound
interest. There’s no trustee like a collector who knows his business.
You may turn over current money to increase it; but the more you
leave that alone the better you’ll realize on it some day. The antiquity
market is always a rising one. Every year adds its interest to it. We
won’t touch the principal yet—not till you come of age. Then we’ll put
it up, my boy—then we’ll put it up; and you shall eat your dinners,
and follow in your dear father’s footsteps, and have chambers in
Fountain Court itself.”
Did he have a real faith in this picture? He had a faith in having a
faith in it, anyhow. Yet sometimes I could not help thinking he shrunk
from that same test of criticism; from the conceivable discovery that
he had wasted all these years of his life on a fond chimera. I am glad
that in the end the test was never forced; that circumstances came to
lay for ever the necessity of it, and in a way than which none other
could have delighted him better. For I believe a realization of the
truth would have broken his kind, unselfish heart.
He had not during this time altogether eschewed his former habits
and enthusiasms. Periodic inventions of purely local inspiration
marked it. He designed a respirator to be lined with porous shavings
of driftwood, so that the asthmatic merchant might inhale ozone in
the thickest fogs of Lombard Street. He planned a boat to be steered
from the front by means of a rudder which was merely a jointed
elongation of the prow, or false beak hinging to the neck, like a fish’s
head and gills: a splendid conception, seeing how the steersman
would be also the look-out, and the crew aft suffer no more
responsibility than passengers in a train.
Other happy notions of his were “the luminous angler,” a hook
rubbed with phosphorus for night fishing; a scheme for pickling
sandhoppers; and an uncapsizable boat, the buoyant principle
whereof was an armour of light iron pipings, each tube of which was
to be divided into a number of little water-tight compartments.
None of these was ever, to my knowledge, put to the actual test,
so pledged is our conservatism to run in a circle. The old stern-
steerer was good enough for our fathers, and were we to be more
exacting than they, who stand to us for all holy prescription? No
inspired inventor ever yet profited by his inspiration; nor did his
descendants find that inspiration marketable until it was mellowed to
a tradition. For which reason Uncle Jenico had to be content, like the
magnanimous soul he was, with planting for the generations to
come.
He never dreamt now, more than I, of leaving the village in which
circumstance had laid us to take root. Aliens at first, we were
become of the soil, and bound to it by many ties of interest and
affection. As to the place itself, Mr. Sant’s hopes of seasonable
visitors, of whom we had been welcomed for the pioneers, were
doomed to non-fulfilment. Whether it was its isolation, its shocking
primitiveness in those days of antimacassars and the social
proprieties, or perhaps its rather forbidding reputation for
inhospitality, which kept strangers away, I do not know; but in any
case they came rarely, and then only as birds of passage. I think it,
at least, quite likely that the third consideration was most operative.
Dunberry, before the days of Mr. Sant, had borne, it must be
confessed, a sinister notoriety—a name for determined and
organized smuggling. Visitors then were neither desired nor
welcomed, the whole native population, or at least with few
exceptions, forming a lawless confederacy for the disposal of
contraband. But after the earthquake (or what was generally cited for
such, and by many, I am persuaded, who knew better, though it
made no difference in the moral), things should have been
otherwise, when the new rector, using its opportunity to reclaim his
wayward flock to godliness, sought to compensate by legitimate
trade for the lost wages of sin. But it is easier to cure the itch than to
convince others of your patient’s recovered cleanness. And so
Dunberry reformed had still to suffer the penalty of Dunberry
unregenerate. Visitors came not to it, and it was in the position of
having dropped the carnal substance for the moral shadow. And
what made it worse was that the Excise, unpersuaded of its
reclamation, chose this very penitential time to dump down a
coastguard station on the cliffs a mile south, and so knocked on the
head for ever any possibility of its relapse into the old prosperous
condition.
The blow fell in the second year of our stay; and from it dated, I
think, the final demoralisation of the ancient order, of which Rampick
might be considered the prominent expression. This man
deteriorated thenceforth year by year, recognizing, I suppose, the
practical uselessness of his hypocrisy. His gradual self-revelation
was a real grief to Mr. Sant, whose worldly common sense was not
always proof against his missionary zeal. He had the pain to see this
cherished convert of his sink into an idle, drunken loafer, with a heart
poisoned with a shapeless black resentment against all whom he
chose to consider were in any way responsible for his ruin; amongst
whom he included, for some unaccountable reason, my uncle and
me, and in only less degree, the dear clergyman himself. But
bankruptcy knows no reason.
At the date at which I reopen my story, Joel Rampick was a
shambling, degraded, evil-looking man, half crazed between drink
and his sense of injury; full of suppressed snarlings and mutterings;
still, as of old, the watchful spirit of the ruins on the hill; still, as of old,
policing Harry and me, though secretly rabid now in his impotency to
control or terrify us; still, as of old, nevertheless, a hypocrite in form,
while he carried his heart on his tattered sleeve. And so, as a main
factor to be in the development of the strange drama, to the dark
accomplishment of which in this year of our opening manhood I have
been reluctantly leading, I reintroduce, and for the moment leave
him.
******
It was a wild, wet November, a season full of tempest and the
promise of it, when guns would boom beyond the fatal sandbanks,
and sudden rockets tear the sky; when the wives would gather a rich
harvest of driftwood, coming down in the morning to a prospect of
frenzied waters, and black spots of wreckage swooping in them like
swallows blown about a storm. Near the end of the month the winds
quieted, and one afternoon fell dead calm, so that Harry and I were
moved to stroll out after dark to stretch our long unexercised limbs. It
was so peaceful after the turmoil, that to enlarge our sense of
convalescence, we took the way of the lonely valley, and climbed the
Abbot’s Mitre. The moon was in its last quarter, and stooping
towards its rest in the earth like a bent and wearied old soul; an idle
drift or two of cloud pursued it, trying the effect of a star here and
there on its gauze, as it loitered; and not a sound broke the stillness
but the whispering chuckle of the small surf on the shingle below.
We sat down on a block of stone in the midst of the huge and
silent congress of ruin. Here were ghostly corridors, which the sea
still mocked with an echo of monkish footsteps; pitch-black corners,
where the faint rustle of mortar falling might have been the muttering
whisper of the confessional; drifts of broken arches, colossal-
shouldered, heaven-supporting in their time, now bowed under the
weight of their hanging-gardens of ivy; shattered windows that were
without a purpose, like open gates set up in a desert. Dim and tragic
in the moonlight, they stood around us, a spectral deputation of
giants, making its unearthly appeal for some human redress or
sympathy. They seemed to hem us in, to throng closer and closer.
An odd nightmare mood possessed me. I shivered, and stamped on
the ground.
“Harry,” I said, with a nervous giggle; “supposing these smuggler
chaps down here ever walk!”
With my very words he started, and nipped my arm like a vice.
“Look!” he whispered thickly, and pointed.
Out from the blackness of the overturned plinth hard by slipped a
grey shadow, a thing that might have been a dog, but was not.
“O!” I shuddered, falling against my friend. “Let’s get away—Harry!
at the back here.”
The sound of my voice, little though it was, appeared to startle the
creature. It turned, paused as if regarding us, seemed to be coming
our way, and vanished again into the glooms from which it had
emerged. I had had a dreadful moment; and so it was with a sense
of outrage that I heard Harry laugh out as he sprang to his feet.
“O!” he cried, skipping and sniggering before me; “to see it come
so pat, and hear his tone change. Wasn’t it beautiful? And him not to
know a bogey from a badger! O, Master Dicky, really!”
“A badger!” I echoed awfully. Then recovered myself and added
with a rather agitated laugh; “Well, don’t pretend you weren’t startled
yourself at first.”
“I?” he exclaimed. “Why, you old donkey, I brought you up here on
purpose, on the chance of seeing it.”
“Bosh!” I snapped.
“Very well,” he said. “I’ll show you its tracks in the mud to-morrow,
if you don’t believe me. I guessed it was somewhere in the hill, and
now I know.”
“Did you?” I said resentfully. “Then I’d rather you played the fool
with me by day.”
“Played!” said he; “what have I played? ’Twas you began with your
ghosts and things. Besides, any fool knows that badgers only walk at
night.”
He sniggered again; then, seeing that I was hurt, took my arm in
his, and patted me down.
“It’s really rather a start, though,” said he—“I mean the thing being
here at all; because they live in woods, you know. But I’ll tell you
what I make of it; that it was driven down by those burnings” (it had
been a very hot summer, with two fires, destroying some acres, up in
the Court woods) “to get near the water. Anyhow, I spotted its tracks
in the soft ground here some days ago, and made up my mind to run
it to earth. We’ll come up to-morrow and have a look by daylight.”
We did as he proposed, and found, amongst the bramble and
other vegetable and miscellaneous litter which choked the
neighbourhood of the great tumbled mass of masonry, indubitable
signs of a passage leading to the creature’s earth.
“Don’t say anything about it,” said Harry, desisting, excited, from
his examination; “and we’ll just have a try to dig it out some day.
Wonder if it could tell us anything about the earthquake?”
He was staring at me, and I at him.
“Harry,” I whispered, thrilling all through; “supposing there’s a way
down after all!”
“Don’t you—believe it, sir,” said Rampick’s breathless voice.
The man had, after his customary fashion, come softly upon us
from some hidden coign of espial. His hands were slouched in his
pockets, and he mumbled a little black clay pipe, shaped like a
death’s head, between his teeth.
“I wouldn’t think—if I were you,” he went on, “fur to pry into the
Lord’s secrets. Let the grave keep its own—pervided I may be so
bold.”
“I wish you wouldn’t pry into our secrets, Mr. Rampick,” said Harry,
loftily. “It’s got to be rather a nuisance this, you know.”
The ex-smuggler snatched his pipe from his lips, and seemed for
an instant as if he were about to dash it to the ground in a fury. But
he recovered himself, and pretended only to be shaking out the
ashes before he returned the cutty to his mouth.
“Secrets?” said he. “Why, you makes me laugh to talk of having
secrets here!”
He broke off, restless in a shaking way to get his pipe to draw;
then turned suddenly upon me.
“You’re a gen’leman, sir,” he said, “and should know better—nor to
meddle in things what don’t concarn you. The Lord has putt His seal
on this here hill: you let it alone—if I may make free to be His
mouthpiece, like Ezekiel what was told to warn the evil doers that
they come not to grief—and die.”
I laughed.
“O, you flatter yourself, Mr. Rampick!” I said. “You aren’t a bit like
Ezekiel.”
He stood regarding me, half perplexed, half malignant, for a
minute; then settled himself down on a stone and smoked away,
silent, his eyes staring and full of a vicious resolution.
“Come on, Dick,” said Harry, seeing it obvious that the man meant
to outstay us, and took my arm and walked me off.
“But we’ll have the badger, nevertheless,” he said, when we were
out of hearing, “and in spite of that sot. Can’t make him out, can
you? Should have thought he’d have welcomed the chance of
recovering some of his old brandy tubs.”
CHAPTER II.
THE GREAT STORM.
“Which it’s well known that ’ope deferred maketh a cat sick,” said
Mrs. Puddephatt, with unintentional irreverence, referring to my
report to my uncle of our late meeting with Mr. Rampick. She was by
this time quite in the family confidence. “Bless you, Master Richard,”
said she, “it’s not the Lord’s secret the man’s so keerful of; it’s ’is
hown, living all these years on the ’opes of salvidge from the ’ill, and
jealous of hothers steppin’ hin and anticepting of ’im.”
Uncle Jenico laughed.
“You’re still as sceptical as ever about the earthquake, Mrs.
Puddephatt,” said he. “Now, it occurs to me, if the hill was, as you
suppose, a rendezvous for smugglers, who by some folly entombed
themselves therein, why wasn’t the whole village plunged
immediately into mourning for the loss at a blow of so many fathers
and brothers?”
Mrs. Puddephatt, standing with folded arms and a bleak, patient
smile, awaited his good pleasure to answer.
“Hev you adone, sir?” she now demanded. “Don’t let me hinterrupt
you before you’ve got it hall hout.”
“Thank you,” said Uncle Jenico, a little abashed. “I think there’s
nothing more.”
“Ho!” said the lady, drawing in a sharp breath. “Then let me
hexpress at once, sir, before more’s said, my hobligation for your
supposing as I’m supposing.”
“I admit it was unpardonable,” answered my uncle, with a beaming
but rather frightened smile. “I should have understood, of course,
that you have warrant for your smugglers.”
“Not my smugglers, sir,” she said, “begging your pardon. Faults
there may be in my pronounciation; but ’awking and spitting in his
langwidge was never yet, so far as I know, laid to the charge of a
Londoner.”
“My dear soul!” began Uncle Jenico. But she interrupted him—
“No, sir; nor to hend the names of his towns with a hoath, which it
is not permitted to a lady’s lips to pollute themselves with huttering.”
“O, really, Mrs. Puddephatt, I don’t understand!” said my uncle in
despair.
“I dare say not, sir,” went on the inexorable female. “But you must
excuse me if I draw the line at Hamster and Rotter.”
“O!” said Uncle Jenico, gathering light through the gloom. “You
mean to imply that these smugglers were Dutchmen?”
She condescended to smile a little, and, pursing her lips, nodded
at him with a very stiff neck.
“Bein’, you see, a Londoner yourself, sir, to which a nod is as good
as a wink. It was Dutchmen what landed and stowed the stuff, and
Dunberry what distributed of it. They howned to no connection with
one another, and worked apart, which was their safety. Dunberry,
bless you, would be dreaming in their beds that hinnercent, while
’Olland would be stuffing of the ’ill with contraband. Honly that
Rampick was the master sperrit and go-between; and now you
knows the truth about ’im.”
We both stared at her breathless.
“Then,” said my uncle at last, “the unfortunate creatures caught up
there, if caught they were——”
“Made no widders in Dunberry, sir,” she put in decisively.
“God bless me!” said Uncle Jenico, much agitated. “Then Rampick
——”
He turned to me.
“Don’t bait the man, Dick,” he said. “Remember, whoever’s to
blame for it, he’s half crazed by his misfortunes; and small wonder,
when some of us find it difficult to keep our heads in prosperity. Why,
dear, dear! It isn’t the part of luck to throw stones, and certainly not
at a dog in a trap. It’s like enough the poor creature’s dangerous. I
dare say I should be if things had gone against me. Don’t bait him,
Dick. Give him a wide berth.”
He had always been a little nervous about this fellow and our
attitude towards him. His appeal was, however, superfluous. The ex-
smuggler was not attractive; and Harry and I were certainly never the
first to invite collision with him. For, what with blight and rum and
sanctimony—which last, from being assumed for a disguise, had
become a half-demoniac possession in him—he was little better at
this day than a smouldering madman. Nevertheless, I tried loyally
henceforth to emulate Uncle Jenico’s better Christianity by making
allowances for the man because of his provocation. After all,
calumny could visit him with no more formidable charge than that of
having been a successful smuggler—a negative indictment even in
these days. And perhaps, the main impeachment admitted, Mrs.
Puddephatt’s cockney perspicacity was not so deadly a detective as
she supposed.
I took Mr. Sant and Harry, of course, into my confidence with
regard to our landlady’s story. It was little more than a confirmation to
them, if that were needed, that Rampick had been the head and front
of the old trade. But the Dutch part was news to us, and nothing less,
I do believe, to Mrs. Puddephatt herself, who, however she had
become acquainted with it, had acquired her knowledge recently, I
am sure, or she would not have omitted hitherto to impress us with it
in her many allusions to the “herthquake.” The rector, for his part,
had speculated, no doubt, like my uncle, upon the equanimity with
which the village had accepted the supposed visitation of God upon
a number of its bread-winners; but had never to this day, I think, in
spite of the respect in which he was held, succeeded in getting
behind the local esprit de corps which hid the real truth from him.
Now much was explained—provided Mrs. Puddephatt had actually
been permitted to discover what had been kept from us—much, that
is to say, except the nature and cause of the catastrophe; and that, I
supposed, we should never find out. But there I was mistaken, as
events will show. For Destiny, having got her puppets at last into
position, was even now gathering the strings into her hands for the
final “Dance of Death.”
In the meanwhile, the last month of the year opened upon us with
a falling barometer and fresh menace of tempest, which it was not
long in justifying. The little calm had been but a breathing time, to
enable Winter to brace his muscles and fill out his lungs. It was on
the night of the fifteenth, I think, that the great storm which followed,
notable even on those coasts, rose to its height. The wind came from
the north-east, with a high tide, which, racing obliquely, cut the cliffs
like a guillotine. The whole village hummed and shook with the roar
of it. Not a chimney but was a screaming gullet into which its breath
was sucked like water. There were ricks scattered like chaff on the
uplands, and trees uprooted with mandrake groans of agony. God
knows, too, what the quicksands knew that night! When the day
broke the worst was already over, and the sea, scattered with the
bones of its prey, sullenly licking its jaws. Far on the drifts of the
Weary Sands gaped the ribs of a mammoth it had torn, the solitary
monument to its rage. The rest was matchwood.
That same night Uncle Jenico and Harry and I were supping at the
rectory. The occasion is vivid in my memory because of a story
which Mr. Sant told us. After the meal we had drawn our chairs to the
fire, and moved, perhaps, by the unearthly racket overhead, were
fallen upon talk of the supernatural. The house lay so close-shut
within trees that the booming of the tempest came to us half muffled.
In its pauses, we could even hear the drip from broken gutters
treading the drive beneath, upon which the dining-room windows
looked, with a sound like stealthy footsteps. It brought to his mind,
said Mr. Sant, a legend he had once heard about a werewolf—the
German vampire. These creatures, men by day, but condemned, for
their unspeakable crimes, to become wolves with the going down of
the sun, are like nothing mortal. It is forbidden to notice, to pity, to
sympathize with them in any way. Whosoever does, yields himself to
their thrall.
One winter evening a peasant-woman, belated in the snow-bound
woods, was hurrying home, with her basket of provisions for the
morrow over her arm, when she heard a pattering behind her, and
looking back, there was a werewolf following. In the hunger of the
miserable creature’s face she saw an expression which haunted
while it terrified her. It was faintly suggestive of something, or
somebody; but of what or whom she could not tell. Yet the lost horror
in it moved her in spite of herself. Her pity mastered her fear. She
took meat from her basket and threw it back, conscious of her secret
sin. “But who will know!” she thought; “and I could not sleep without.”
The creature stopped to devour the morsel, which enabled the
woman to escape and reach her home in safety. But all the following
day her deed dwelt with her, so that towards evening, unable to bear
her own sole confidence any longer, she went down to the lonely
church to confess her sin and be absolved of it. She rang the little
sacristy bell, and summoned the solitary confesser. He came, and
behind the bars heard her avowal. Then, as listening to it he turned
his face, she saw that snap and change in the gloom. The eyes
rounded, the brows puckered and met, the jaw shot down and forth.
Before her, glaring through the bars, was the werewolf of the
preceding night. It barked and snapped at the grating which divided
them, then dropped, and she heard it issue forth and come pattering
round to the side where——
We were never to know, for at that instant, weird and unearthly in
a pause of the storm, there rose a long melancholy bay outside the
window. We all fell like mutes, staring at one another; then, moved
by a single impulse, jumped to our feet and made for the front door.
The wind battled to crush us with it, driving us back as we raised the
latch, and so whipped our eyelashes and flared the lights in the hall
that for a minute we could do nothing. But when at last we emerged
and stood in the drive, not a living shape of any sort was to be seen
—only the tossed bushes and black tree trunks.
“It must have been a wandering dog,” said Mr. Sant; “something
attracted by the light. Come in again, all of you.”
But we would only re-enter to get our coats and caps for the
homeward march. Some growing sense of unbounded licence in the
storm awed us, I think, and drew us like cowed beasts to our lairs.
As we butted through the darkness, a form detached itself from the
shadows in a deep part of the lane, and followed staggering and
hooting in our wake. It was Rampick, blazing drunk, and his maniac
laugh pursued my uncle and me long after we were housed and
shuddering between the sheets.
CHAPTER III.
OPEN SESAME.
I had a vision sometimes of our tight little island lying on the sea like
a round of bread and butter on a plate, and the Angel of the Storm
amusing himself by biting patterns out of its edges. The coast in our
part of the world was particularly inviting to him, because, I suppose,
it was crumb, and not rocky with crust like other parts. Anyhow he
never flew near without setting his teeth in it somewhere, and on this
occasion to such gluttonous effect that he must have blown himself
out before he had fairly settled down to his meal. His attack was as
short as it was violent. For miles north and south the cliffs had been
torn and gulped—only the birds, mapping them from above, could
have said into what new fantastic outline. Landmarks were gone,
and little bays formed where had been promontories. Here and there
a fisherman’s boat had been licked out of its winter perch, that that
same angel might play bounce-ball with it on the cliffs until it was
broken to bits. The wreck and flotsam on the shore were
indescribable; and sad and ugly was the sight of more than one
drowned mariner entangled in them. I turn my memory gladly from
such retrospects, to concentrate it upon those features of the havoc
which most concern this history.
Waterside folk are a strangely incurious and fatalistic race. Once
having satisfied themselves after a storm that their craft, disposed
here and there in winter quarters, are untouched, the changes
wrought on their sea-front interest them only in so far and so long as
those changes mean profitable wreckage. When that is all gathered,
they withdraw again to their winter burrows and winter occupations,
and leave the foreshore to its natural desolation.
At least, that is what Dunberry did after the gale and within a
couple of days following it, than which no longer was needed, it
appeared, to secure any salvage worth the landing. For there is this
characteristic of great tempests, that from their destructive rage they
yield a poorer harvest of “whole grain,” so to speak, than do
moderate ones. The latter, maybe, deposit some literal pickings in
the shape of crates, barrels, seamen’s chests, etc., yet compact; the
former for the most part mere disjecta membra. It followed, therefore,
that when Harry and I next visited the beach—which, as it happened,
he having been away, and I confined to the house with a beastly
cold, we did not do until the afternoon of the third day succeeding
that night of uproar—we found we had the whole place virtually to
ourselves.
Uncle Jenico, who, from his anxious concern for me, had also kept
at home during the interval, came with us, full of suppressed
eagerness to glean the torn fields of shingle for relics. I think I only
realized the self-restraint which his affection must have imposed
upon him in those two days, when I saw the almost childish joy with
which he greeted the sight of the weedy litter strewn, as far as the
eye could reach, along the shore.
“Why, Richard!” he exclaimed, rubbing his hands, while his
spectacles seemed to twinkle again, “here’s a chance indeed! It’s an
ill wind that blows nobody—— Poor souls, poor souls! I feel like
robbing the grave to take such advantage of their misery.”
His countenance fell a moment; but his mood was not proof
against the stupendous prospect.
“The sea’s a pretty big grave, sir,” said Harry. “You might as well
have scruples about digging gold out of the earth, seeing we’re all
buried there.”
“That’s true,” said Uncle Jenico, with serious delight. “That’s quite
true, my boy. I only hope I’ve not left it to too late.”
This gave me a little qualm.
“Shall I come with you, uncle?” I said.
“No, Dicky,” he answered; “no, no, no. You and Harry amuse
yourselves as you will. I wouldn’t deny myself for anything the
gratification of the treat I’m going to bring you by-and-by. It’s selfish,
no doubt; but—but I’d rather be alone.”
And he hobbled away, calling out to us not to let our expectations
run too high, or he might be defrauded of his opportunity to surprise
us.
“He’s a real trump,” said Harry. “I hope you think so, Dick.”
“Of course I do,” I answered, rather testily, and began to whistle.
“That’s all right, then,” said he. “And now let’s explore.”
It was a fine, still afternoon, with the tide at quiet ebb, and a touch
of frost in the air. The sun, low down, burned like a winter fire, and
gleamed with a light of sadness on the ribs of the gaunt wreck lying
far away on the Weary Sands. She was visible only at low water; at
high being completely submerged. No one, so far as I knew, had yet
had the curiosity or venturesomeness to row out and investigate the
poor castaway. It was just plain to see, by the aid of glasses, that
she had broken her back on the drift, and that only her stern half
remained, wedged into the sand. But what her name or condition
Dunberry had not had the energy to inquire.
We were standing at gaze at the foot of the Gap, and when Uncle
Jenico went north, we, in obedience to his wish to be left alone,
turned our faces down the coast. But we had not taken a score or so
of steps when we hooted out simultaneously over the sight that was
suddenly revealed to us. The storm had bolted a great hunk, good
ten feet through at its thickest, of the Mitre, obliterating the already
half-effaced step-way by which Rampick had been wont to ascend,
and laying bare, high up in the cliff, a mass of broken masonry. From
the character of this last it was evident at a glance what had
happened. The seaward limit to the crypts of the old abbey had been
shorn through, and the extreme vaulting of that ancient underworld
exposed. Nor was this all. The well, now thus further isolated from
the hill which had once contained it, was grown, from the washing
away of the sand at its base, an apparent five feet or so taller, and
was leaning outwards at a distinctly acuter and more ominous angle
with the shore.
We stood excited a moment, then, without a word, raced to get a
closer view. The wrack and downfall, as we looked up at their traces,
must have been stupendous; yet so great had been the pulverising
force of the waves, the mighty silt from them, except for a few
tumbled blocks of stone, was all dispersed and distributed about the
shore below, so that a new cliff face, clear of ruin, went up in a pretty
clean sweep from beach to summit sixty feet above. From the lower
curve of this, where it ran out and down into the sand, the well
projected, not ten feet above us, like a little tower of Pisa; and yet
thirty feet higher, at a point in the hill face about on a level with the
well top, gaped the jagged ruin of masonry which the storm had laid
bare.
“Dick!” whispered Harry—“Dick!” (He was gulping and gripping my
arm hard, as he stared up.) “Supposing we could climb to there and
look in!”
“Yes!” I choked back. I knew what was in his mind; and the thought
fascinated while it frightened me horribly.
“I’ve never seen a Dutchman,” he said. “Mrs. Puddephatt, she—it
would be fun to find out the truth. What are they like?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, shivering. “They wear lots of breeches,
I believe. But it’s no good. The place is all choked up. You can see
for yourself.”
There was no apparent entrance that way, indeed. The contour of
the vaulting was roughly discernible, it is true, but so stopped with
mud and débris as to offer no visible passage.
“Besides,” I went on, swallowing fast and trying to escape from the
fluttering spell the mere suggestion had laid upon me,—“whether it
was an earthquake or gunpowder, it’s all the same. It must be just all
squash and ruin inside; and—and the things——” I stuck, feeling that
I dare not speculate further.
Harry released my arm, and for some time looked down, making
thoughtful patterns with his foot in the sand.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said, raising his face suddenly. “But I’d
mighty like to see.”
We were both rather silent for the rest of the afternoon; and,
though we neither of us alluded to the subject for a day or two
afterwards, it was evident it stood between us. We avoided the spot,
too; until one evening a long ramble brought us back by the shore
past it. Then, by a common impulse, we stopped, and stood gaping
silent up once more. The light from the sinking sun smote level upon
the face of the cliff, so that it stood out as bright as a grate back. Its
surface, quite dried from the tempest, reflected no glaze of water.
The rivulets of mud, which had flowed over and sealed the scar of
ruin above, were hardened like plaster, though shrinkage had
opened black fissures in them here and there.
Harry, softly whistling, left me suddenly, and, with his hands in his
pockets, toiled indifferently up the slope to the well foot. Here, still
whistling, he began kicking round the base; but in a moment
desisted and called to me. I went up, and he fell upon his knees, and
set to scraping with his fingers.
“See?” he said, stopping.
“No; what?” I answered.
“Why, look, you bat!” said he. “Nothing under; nothing deeper.
Here’s the last bottom course of the thing; the foundation stones, or
I’m a——”
He checked himself, grinning.
“I was going to say ‘Dutchman,’” said he; “and, for all we know,
they may be listening up there.”
“O, don’t be a beast!” I exclaimed, with a wriggle of discomfort.
He chuckled again.
“Well, anyhow,” he said, “here’s the old well just standing on its
end, like a drain-pipe with a tilt to it. If we brought spades and dug
away underneath on the outside, it would fall—and on the top of us,
too; but that’s a detail. Wonder the storm didn’t finish it, don’t you?
Must have come pretty near to.”
As he spoke, staring up at me, he suddenly uttered a soft
exclamation, and scrambling to his feet, pulled at my arm.
“Look there!” he whispered. “Don’t move!”
I followed the direction of his hand, which was pointing to the scar
in the cliff-face above. I could see nothing.
“Hush, you old fool!” he said impatiently. “Keep quiet!”
I did not stir; till, at the end of a long interval, something made me
start involuntarily. It was a wink—a flutter—a motion of some sort, I
knew not what, on the hill front.
“Did you see?” whispered Harry.
“Yes,” I muttered back. “What was it?”
He ran down the slope to the sand, and I followed at a leap,
thinking he meant that the cliff was falling. But when I saw his face I
knew that some excitement other than fear was moving him.
“It was the badger,” he said, turning sharp on me. “Now, do you
understand what that means?”
Perhaps I had a glimmering; but I shook my head feebly to
repudiate it.

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