Book part:

Affective Media Regulation: Or, How to Counter the Blackboxing of Emotional Life

This contribution argues that with the emergence of affective media, affect or emotion regulation is undergoing a decisive transformation, because it is increasingly facilitated by automated systems that process users’ affect expressions and encourage certain behaviors to maximize their happiness. It further develops the notion that affective media regulation itself demands regulations in a legal and sociopolitical sense. This argument is developed in four stages. (1) A brief overview of the terms “affect regulation“ (Norbert Elias) and “emotion regulation“ (Allan Schore; James Gross) in sociology and psychology provides some insight into the increasing centrality of these concepts and their position within the Foucauldian genealogy of the “security principle“ (Frédéric Gros). (2) The term “affective media“ is defined with recourse to Kittlerian/Winklerian media theory as pertaining to affect-responsive media, or media capable of processing affect. (3) The near-total reliance of present affective computing applications on Paul Ekman’s contested, if not outright refuted, theory of universal basic emotions leads to some serious doubts about its possible effects on users and their “emotional granularity“ (Lisa Feldman Barrett). (4) Picking up on arguments made by critical algorithm studies, Shoshana Zuboff’s critique of “surveillance capitalism,“ and legal scholars’ fight for a “right to reasonable inference“ by automated systems (Sandra Wachter and Brent Mittelstadt), a wide-ranging discussion of the dangers and pitfalls of blackboxing emotional life through affective media is encouraged.