Electronic Emotion: The Mediation of Emotion via Information and Communication Technologies, edited by Jane Vincent and Leopoldina Fortunati. Interdisciplinary Communication Studies, Vol. 3. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2009. 237 pp. $51.95 paper. ISBN 978-3-039-11866-3 (paper).

摘要

The collection of highly academic scholarship that makes up Electronic Emotion is the result of a 2007 seminar in Pordenone, Italy, that exhibited the work of leading researchers in the communication field. The Pordenone Group of Scholars, composed of individuals both international and interdisciplinary, convened to discuss the relationship between emotions and information and communication technologies (ICTs). The seminar produced such compelling discussion regarding our understanding of ICTs "through the lens of emotion" that editors Jane Vincent and Leopoldina Fortunati decided to organize the scholarship into a book (17). Past work in this field, such as Kathleen Woodward's (1991), focused on "prosthetic emotions" and examined how they were ascribed to fictional machines in literature, film, and television in a way that evoked a kind of animism (95). The collected research in Electronic Emotion differs slightly in that it focuses not on the machines themselves, but on human emotions either elicited by or mediated through the use of ICTs.