Relevant For:
- Researchers and graduate students in media studies and sociology
- Policymakers designing rules for platform accountability
- Product designers and content moderators seeking conceptual clarity
Remarkable Points:
- Frames platforms as an emotional economy where attention is converted into affective value
- Positions content moderation and influencer work as essential, often unseen, emotional labor
- Dissects how design patterns and algorithms operationalize hope and fear as engagement drivers
- Connects image based harms and deepfakes to structural incentives rather than isolated tech failure
- Integrates science and technology studies to move beyond moral panic narratives
Most Liked (As-Is Statements):
Algorithms do not merely rank; they stage emotional relations between users and platforms.
Hope functions as a product feature when it directs behavior toward monetizable futures.
Key Themes:
Theme 1: Emotional Economy
Petersen treats affect as currency. He shows how attention, content, and design translate into predictable emotional returns that platforms monetize.
Theme 2: Invisible Labor
Moderation, curation, and influencer work are reframed as labor that sustains the platform's apparent intelligence. This draws attention to distributional and ethical questions.
Theme 3: Design and Affect
Design is analyzed as a vector of emotional modulation. Small interface choices aggregate into large shifts in hope, anger, and addiction risk.
Theme 4: Governance and Risk
Concerns about harm are tied to structural incentives. Policy responses need to account for emotional regimes, not just content categories.
Final Remark:
The value of this book is analytic, not encyclopedic. It offers compact mental models that let you separate technological capability from incentive structures and human costs. Where many treatments linger on anecdotes, Petersen supplies causal framing tools you can reuse. Read it to sharpen questions rather than collect more examples.
Understanding online emotion as engineered, mediated, and labor dependent changes what interventions are plausible and which merely look reassuring.
Similar Books:
- Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society
- Siva Vaidhyanathan, Anti Social Media
- Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
- Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet