Darren Ellis

This chapter explores the development of technologies using forms of artificial intelligence (AI) in emotion-related data (much of which has been developed in “affective computing”). Our focus is on the efforts made to try to track, identify, interpret, replicate, and potentially manipulate emotional activity. AI has been associated with emotion 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 techniques 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 social interaction with humans. Affective computing is a field of significant size and growing influence, especially in industry. It remains a sub-field of engineering, though, which recruits existing models of emotion from psychology (primarily) 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.

As a result of digital technologies and the internet becoming increasingly ubiquitous, security technologies and surveillance systems are progressively encroaching upon peoples’ privacy. Yet concerns about this appear to be relatively muted. Why is this the case? Is the public generally indifferent about it or perhaps silently in agreement with its increased presence? As techno-security systems are becoming increasingly complex, multiple, normative, hardly recognisable, often covert and all encompassing, positioning oneself in relation to them can be a difficult process. Hence the techno-securitisation of everyday life has psychological effects which are multiple and largely unconscious. Indeed, we are all somewhat uncertain about the spin-offs of surveillance technologies and practices – in terms of their capabilities, who has access to the data they produce, and the ways that they might affect subjectivity. Rather than being plainly indifferent or silently consenting to increased techno-securitisation, some participants in this study developed an attitude of surveillance-apatheia. They tended to state that ‘as there is no avoiding these systems and not much one can do about them, why consciously worry about them?’ This attitude is not necessarily a lack of interest, but rather a way of managing associated undesirable affects, feelings and emotions.

The spaces that surveillance produces can be thought of as ambiguous, entailing elements that are ethereal yet material, geographical yet trans-geographical. Contemporary surveillance systems form numerous connections that involve multiple times, spaces, and bodies. Owing to their ubiquity, normalization, and yet clandestine characteristics, they seem to produce an almost unnoticed aspect of everyday life. The impacts, then, of contemporary surveillance systems appear to be particularly experienced on the margins of consciousness. Thus we find that an empirical analysis of this realm of experience is possible but requires one to look for such things as disruption, disfluency, and hesitation in the text of speech acts rather than clear representation. Through empirical analysis of narratives concerning everyday experiences of living with contemporary surveillance systems, this paper focuses on their possible affective impacts. In turn, we find it more fitting to think about the so-called “surveillance society” in terms of producing “atmospheres” rather than “cultures or assemblages,” and “affects” rather than “emotions.”

Empirical research concerned with the trust that individuals may or may not have in surveillance systems has largely been gauged through opinion poll and survey type research. Although these may be useful in augmenting broad patterns of trust based attitudes, this article argues that they tend to harbour theoretically weak conceptualisations of trust which may produce misleading results. We draw on relevant concepts related to notions of ‘impersonal trust’ (for example, ‘access points’, ‘facework’ and ‘suspension’) to facilitate a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews which concerned Londoners’ trust related experiences, perceptions and understandings of living in a so called ‘surveillance society’. We form a number of preliminary conclusions which are of interest to sociological research on trust and surveillance studies: contrary to prior research on trust and surveillance, trust related positions may be neither static nor polarised, but processual and situational; the suspension of certainty bridged by impersonal trust is particularly problematic in surveillance systems as they especially lack access points; and impersonal trust related positions are likely to be considerably weak as information about the systems requires specialist information.

Evidence generated within the emotional disclosure paradigm (EDP) suggests that talking or writing about emotional experiences produces health benefits, but recent meta-analyses have questioned its efficacy. Studies within the EDP typically rely upon a unidimensional and relatively unsophisticated notion of emotional inhibition, and tend to use quantitative forms of content analysis to identify associations between percentages of word types and positive or negative health outcomes. In this article, we use a case study to show how a qualitative discourse analysis has the potential to identify more of the complexity linking the disclosure practices and styles that may be associated with emotional inhibition. This may illuminate the apparent lack of evidence for efficacy of the EDP by enabling more comprehensive theorisations of the variations within it.