How the Internet Affects Our Emotions
Human emotions are powerful and difficult to explain. On the one hand, everyone has emotions and understands them on some level, but they are very personal and difficult to quantify. Emotion research falls into very different, but often overlapping, categories, from psychological and medical to sociological and language-based.
Some research, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, explores how emotions work and how they are used to achieve specific goals, directly or indirectly, in communication. trying to understand.
Emotions can be accessed through any layer of information, so in a world where so much information is provided through multimedia, primarily in the form of video, understanding emotions as part of communication is becoming increasingly important. .
There’s something about videos and images that changes the way we respond to written content. Perhaps it’s the way visuals make sense of us in an instant, or perhaps it’s the several layers of information we have to process. Social media now favors visuals over videos. In other words, as his commentator Ryan Broderick aptly put it, “We’re now firmly planted in a TikTok-first, and by extension, a video-first, Internet.”
To fully understand video content, you need to think about visuals, words, and audio. Video and the direct human-to-human contact it provides is powerful. When we see someone speaking to us on video, we see their face, eyes, and expressions. It feels like you’re nearby. Like other celebrities, we may develop some kind of relationship with the content creators we watch often as we learn more about them through our viewing.
Music within audiovisual content can significantly change how we perceive something and is also a gateway to our emotions. The same technique that makes you root for someone in a movie or empathize with their situation can be used in audiovisuals of all kinds, from a video of your neighbor’s funny cat to a political candidate making the case for why you should vote. Can be used in format.
