A contagion of emotions

Experts say the current feverish sharing of feelings on social media is not only influencing the emotional climate of our societies, but also leading to a subtle shift in social and political values.

However you put it, 2020 has been an emotional blackhole for the majority of us — a dark, mysterious swirl, where no light can enter and none can escape. Atleast, it feels so. All of us, at one point or the other, have experienced varying degrees of misery, annoyance, irritation, fear, anxiety, panic even, ennui certainly and fatigue. Oh, the fatigue. The inevitable drudgery. And worse, the creeping dread of not seeing any end in sight. Indeed, the Coronavirus pandemic is a crisis that has created a whole new sack of emotions for us to deal with — not that we were not grappling with our everyday anxieties and worries pre-2020. And where do we end up dumping all this excess baggage of feelings? On social media, of course.

Social media is a world already coloured by polarised views, a place where life is lived in binaries — as they say, you are either a hero or a zero online. There is no middle ground. Unlike in real life, people seem incapable online of holding two opposing arguments in their head. This is a place where chatter wins over logic; and emotions always, always win over everything else — whether they be logic, reasoning or solid evidence. In fact, the much-maligned Sigmund Freud had stated blandly that our judgements are always based on our emotions and then we trace backwards to justify them. Our collective behaviour on social media is forcing psychiatrists to acknowledge the truth of such Freudisms. (This ‘tracing back’ explains why we continue to vote for our favourite politicians despite their everyday betrayal; why we end up choosing ‘wrong’ partners or even why we nod our little heads to things we know deep in our heart cannot be true.)

Hot topic

The pandemic has only served to heighten these pre-existing tendencies online. It has brought into sharp focus both the intense complexity of our societies today and the desperate simplicity with which we want to tackle it with. Precisely why the role of emotions in social media during a pandemic is now a hot topic of research. Earlier studies by social scientists from Warwick University in the UK showed clear correlations between hate crimes in Germany and the extent of Facebook usage; the social media app has also been accused of fostering ethnic violence in Sri Lanka and Myanmar with rumours on Facebook triggering actual physical confrontations.

Researcher Steffen Steinert from the Delft University of Technology, in a paper on ‘Corona and Value Change’, says the pandemic has created an “emotionally taxing” time and people have a tendency to share primarily negative emotions online. This is exacerbated by the fact that social media tends to reward ‘sadfishing’, or emotionally charged messages more than happy announcements. This emotional climate, he argues, is contributing to a shift in values that emphasise security, conformity and stability. To quote him: “Because personal and political values are related, threat-based change in personal values will likely foster a change in political values... This political change could (lead to a) potential detriment of rights and civil liberties, because in times of perceived threat, people are more willing to give up said civil liberties.”

Real-time data

He is clearly on the right track — for we see this happening all around us. This real time tracking excites social scientists much because never before in history have they been presented with such huge amounts of instant data, or digital traces as they are technically called, to examine and sift through. In fact, according to the Computational Story Lab set up in the University of Vermont, USA, May 31st this year was the ‘saddest day’ on Twitter, not only of 2020, but also in the last 13 years! Called the ‘Hedonometer’, this invention by two mathematicians, considers word choices in millions of tweets and spews out statistics to help measure the mental wellbeing of online users.

Unsurprisingly, since the beginning of the pandemic, the Hedonometer has apparently been breaking its own records of ‘sadness’ readings. The Hedonometer is only one among several setups that researchers are now employing to gauge how emotions play out on social media websites.

This is an important development because, for years, research on mental wellbeing has not only suffered because of self-reporting and unreliable surveys, but also because the subjects chosen for study are often only from certain social criteria and countries. With social media providing a rich diversity, scientists are hoping future studies will be able to provide better correlations and a deeper understanding of how our emotions and social media constantly interact and influence each other.

Because, whether we like it or not, our world is being transformed more by the way we feel about things than anything logical or rational, pandemic or no pandemic. Rather than ignore or diminish the importance of emotions in our socio-political universe today, we might just need to get better at understanding and learning from them. Examining them on social media is just a start.