Abstract
Social media technologies (SMTs) are routinely identified as a strong and pervasive threat to digital well-being (DWB). Extended screen time sessions, chronic distractions via notifications, and fragmented workflows have all been blamed on how these technologies ruthlessly undermine our ability to exercise quintessential human faculties. One reason SMTs can do this is because they powerfully affect our emotions. Nevertheless, (1) how social media technology affects our emotional life and (2) how these emotions relate to our digital well-being remain unexplored. Remedying this is important because ethical insights into (1) and (2) open the possibility of designing for social media technologies in ways that actively reinforce our digital well-being. In this article, we examine the way social media technologies facilitate online emotions because of emotional affordances. This has important implications for evaluating the ethical implications of today’s social media platforms, as well as for how we design future ones.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 36 |
Number of pages | 21 |
Journal | Philosophy & Technology |
Volume | 35 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jun 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:S. S.’s research was funded by European Research Council, award number 788321. M. D.’s research has been funded by the OCW Ministerie and NWO (Zwaartekracht: 024004031).
Keywords
- Affordances
- Digital well-being
- Emotional affordances
- Emotions
- Feelings