Mood and Mobility: Navigating the Emotional Spaces of Digital Social Networks

The simple proposition of this book is that designers, practitioners, educators, researchers, and reflective users of ubiquitous digital networks and devices need to pay greater attention to the issue of mood. The technologies in question include smartphones, tablets, laptops, cameras, audio recorders, and the increasing array of sensing and actuating technologies that monitor and modify the states of our bodies, our social interactions, and our environments. I include social media, news and entertainment channels, and media for crowdsourced creative coproduction and prosumption in this complex matrix. In total, this sociotechnical array of interconnected equipment, systems, and practices has an inevitable influence on the way we feel.

I focus in this book on mood rather than emotion. The study of mood brings issues to light in ways that foreground a diversity of cultural contexts and opinions. Mood is a concept so rich and undetermined that it’s necessary to scan insights and controversies from many disciplines. As I’ve discovered, nearly everyone with whom I speak about the topic of this book has something valuable to say about mood.