Datarsis — the Catharsis of the Digital Age, or How Platforms Define Emotional Experiences

Abstract

At the end of the 20th – beginning of the 21st century, technology started to be perceived not as much as a means, but as an outlet, as a fashion, and a personalization factor, – in other words, as an expansion of ways of presence and influence. It coincides with the trend of emotional design, the production of impressions and affects, which gradually changed the approach at the level of commercial, design- and engineering solutions towards devising digital environments, bringing them closer to the new living spheres that promise radical possibilities and alternative forms of existence. The idea that digital interfaces should be functional, operational, and rational is being replaced by the imperative of affective interaction with technology. Computers do not solve problems as much as they accumulate the potential for affective-emotional interaction in new environments of life. Just as humans have built symbiotic relationships at the level of animal populations, in the same way humans have to achieve a qualitatively new grade of existence and well-being at the level of interaction with emotional machines. However, it soon turned out that the emotions released online and digitally began not so much to reflect and express personal hopes and fears, weaknesses and opportunities, as to impose themselves on humans; instead of the promised exclusivity and radicalism, they turned out to be new means of collectivization or even standardization. In other words, it was not emotions that became intermediaries for the transmission of experiences, but a person who became an intermediary for emotions – which cast doubt on the very possibility of non-algorithmic feeling and caused escapade crisis. The article shows how emotions and trials, in search of the forms of interaction with technology, pass from the early utopia of new transgressive experiences to the late digital pessimism. The concept of datarsis meaning possible use of digital platforms not for action, but for liberation from action in order to discover new forms of presence is also introduced here.