“Kind of Blue: Social Media Photography and Emotion”

Henning, Michelle ORCID: 0000-0003-3798-7227 (2022) “Kind of Blue: Social Media Photography and Emotion”. Digital Culture and Society, 7 (2). pp. 29-54.

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Abstract

This paper considers emotion recognition and sentiment analysis in relation to social media photographs. It addresses this as part of a larger regime of surveillance and control, in which photographs are treated as symptoms for a diagnosis, and are quantified as data. Automated emotion recognition approaches are capable in principle of analysing the visual qualities of social photos insofar as these can be measured and represented numerically. In reducing the photograph to data, they select out features of the image, as a means to explain or describe a mental state that lies behind or beyond the image. To treat photographs as emotionally expressive goes against the historical idea of the photograph as objective recording. Originally the idea that photographs could move their viewers was linked to the sense of photography as detached documentation. Today, more and more people take and share photographs as part of a larger shift in emotional culture, which places a therapeutic sense of self at the heart of economy and governance. Yet while people use mobile phone photos as a means of expressive documentation and self-representation, emotion recognition relies on a behaviourist and positivist model that is indifferent to their intentions and to culture, and which is premised on a myth of total knowledge

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	attention economy, Data mining, Digital image, emotional computing, networked image, Surveillance
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of the Arts
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	01 Jun 2022 13:44
Last Modified:	04 Aug 2023 01:30
DOI:	10.14361/dcs-2021-070203
Related URLs:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3155789