Let’s talk about ‘technological sadness’, the default mental state of the online billions.
What happens when nothing can motivate you anymore, when all the self-optimization techniques fail and you begin to carefully avoid these forms of emotional analytics? Compared to others your ranking is low – and this makes you sad. In this presentation Dutch media theorist, internet critic and founder of the Institute of Network Cultures will discuss the dark side of the net. The mental state of internet users is tragic. Instead of empowerment and self-organisation, what we mostly see around is anger, boredom, loneliness and despair. How did we end up like this? The lecture will zoom in on the widespread techno-sadness that is produced by dominant social media platforms through ‘behavioral modification’ (also known as ‘nudging’) with the aim to keep users coming back to the app, exposing them to even more personalized adds. Instead of empowerment and diversity we witness a ‘chilling effect’ of hyper conformism.