The Emotional Cycle of Digital Interactivity

Hi – I don’t think there’s anything to “miss” here, really just thinking and expanding on the concept. I have two thoughts to your comment: first, I think triggering emotions is certainly a design consideration, but it is not the user experience. Big difference. You mentioned content sharing — Internet platforms do rigorous A/B or multivariate testing (copy lines, object positions, etc. etc.), but what they typically do not account for is the actual emotional experiences of users, and further to your point, the personalities of users. And I’m not talking about “personas” per se, I’m talking about people reacting to or feeling things in different contexts.

Facebook has always had a huge problem with this, and it’s probably the reason why it took Google so long to launch a successful social network.

Second, you raise an interesting point about axes — I don’t think it is that teleological or black-and-white (hence, a recursive cycle). I think we experience points of introversion and extroversion as we interact or share. The positive and negative emotions (or their domains) represent areas of conflict… My own example is a love/hate relationship with Facebook and other “social media”: I often feel at once exposed, fearful and insecure while I yearn for acceptance, validation or perhaps love, respect and admiration from my peers.

This seems to be the great paradox — how can we build social systems that induce or empower less conflictual and more serendipitous feelings?

Daniel — a fantastic articulation and even more fantastic questions, thank you for this contribution.

I’m in part a data guy, so I’ll attempt to answer these questions by starting there.

In a few words: We can mine for emotion, and cultivate it, using the very tools at our disposal, both technological and methodological (human). This symbiosis, in itself, is one that operates in context, and is relatively free of bias, at least in its initial formations.

An example is how journalists (good journalists, this is) develop stories. My upcoming book with Brendan Howley and Sasha Grujicic talks all about this, but I will say that the union of inspired method + creative use of tools + operable context is precisely how we build great content, great products and sustainable markets. The critical levers? Emotion and emotional domains. I don’t mean sentiment (that output we try to automate through various tools), but raw, unfettered emotion. Emotion drives story (co)creation, which drives mutual understanding (accounting for all sides and perspectives), which drives better content, which drives stronger metadata, which makes for greater insights around the human condition and so on.

There’s even a greater benefit to this: Scale. In a way, we’re constantly rewriting history, only now we’re doing it through multiple lenses, like collective intelligence.

We can track emotions both intrinsically (as I’d like to suggest here), and of course extrinsically, and, literally we can map them out. Jonathan Harris’s “We Feel Fine” and more recently, Cowbird, are beautiful manifestations of this, but there are also methods in existence — like “emotional mapping” that take this a step further — into the unknowns, or, the unknown unknowns. This is where not only innovations happen, but where values like empathy emerge to change the way we act and feel about the world.

http://goonth.posterous.com/story-as-genealogy-the-power-of-data-narrativ

What happens next? Our metadata is richer, which means we wring out far deeper correlations to how and why we do what we do, and more importantly, what this means in our relationships to each other. This is crucial. This is where our personal and collective stories emerge.

We are at a formative point in our history as a civilization; the rubber has already met the road in terms what we are potentially capable of as industrialists. Industrialism has become about gaming, artificial scarcity, and uglier things like warfare. But, as you artfully suggest, now the “how becomes the why”. This is not to suggest that our days of innovation are over or in stasis; quite the contrary, this means that the time has come for our true purposes and intentions to align with the way we live, work and become more fulfilled human beings, even if we are inclined by nature to fight or cheat or engage in the shameful.

And that, my friend, is how we close the gaps. That is how we avoid bubbles. And that is how we compete over value, not blind or artificial scarcity.

And it is my belief, along with my partners, that this “new” evolution happens through story. In the near term, we can break through filters tied to sharing in online networks, as just one example. But as we do the “smaller” things, the bigger shifts reveal themselves.

We’re getting there, it’s just that the old regimes are hanging onto the old story. But they won’t be able to for much longer

Hi Ben — thanks for this.

I don’t disagree, but are stimulation and filtering actions rather than emotions? I ask because there are probably even more actions – such as validation or isolation (similar to reclusion) – that would certainly factor in, but this was an attempt to capture emotional dynamics behind causation, rather than the effects of it. Put another way, what are the specific emotions you feel when you interact on G+ or Instragram (as you filter or become stimulated)? I think these questions and distinctions are important because as strategists and developers, we all too often ascribe behavior to actions, and overlook feelings.

That said, it seems you’re also alluding to an important connection between emotional states and building the senses, and our cognition around it. Maybe that’s a follow-up exploration, as I don’t think these sites necessarily build up cognitive skills, but they certainly have the potential to do so.

Also, I want to point out that this doesn’t just cover social media; for example, this would include eCommerce interactions or downloading behaviors or even interactions with video content (which I don’t consider to be “social” so much as “viral” or “immersive”). Another point in doing this is to challenge our notions of why we think media is even considered social in the first place…