Counting the Affects: Discoursing in Numbers - innovations in computer systems

Social Research, Summer, 2001 by Otniel E. Dror

ON the MIT Affective Computing Laboratory website (http://www.media.mit.edu/affect/), computers and humans are realizing new modes of human-affective machine interactions. Computer-enhanced technologies measure, quantify, and identify emotional or affective states and communicate their affective measurements in real-time to personal or web-based computers.

One goal of the Affective Computing project, Jennifer Healey and Grant Gould report on the site, "is to build computer systems that can sense users' emotional states." "Comfortable, aesthetically acceptable" sensors--shaped into rings, shoes, bracelets, and earrings--transmit in real-time biophysiological changes that reflect alterations in emotional states. This "wearable jewelry," together with cameras and sensors that "recognize stress," "a digital music delivery system ... [that] plays music based on your current mood," and "Expression Glasses" that allow "any viewer to visualize the confusion and interest levels of the wearer"--are the new props, nomenclature, and gadgets of a unique phase in human-machine interaction.

The affective technologies at MIT have already been applied to monitor subjects at the office, at home, or even "in line at the bank." They transmit the collected affective data "to personal computers and to the Internet." The private and lived experiences of users engaged in everyday activities are thus broadcast across and into the public and digitized environments of cyberspace.

These phantasmagoric realizations of a fusion between human affect and machine, coupled with numeric and, at times, digitized modalities for representing, storing, and transmitting the passions, seem to indicate a radical departure from traditional modes of human-machine interaction. They promise to revolutionize not only our interactions with machines, but also our inter- and intra-subjective modes of communicability and self-manipulation.

One click away from these dys/utopic visions of emergent affective technologies is a parallel universe of online "Passion Meters," "Love Meters," "Hate Meters," "Fear Meters," and other affective-measuring devices. These latter technologies appeal to a popular audience that seeks to measure, quantify, and represent its realized or potential emotions in a visual and semiquantitative or numeric form.

At <http://predictions.astrology.com/lvm/calc.html>, an online meter takes love readings directly from the user's home computer screen: "Place your thumb in the Love Meter window" on your computer screen, "Click on the start button while your thumb is still pressed to the meter (Do not lift your thumb)," and your "Love Meter reading will appear instantly." Other meters on the web deploy hidden algorithms that calculate the affective possibilities of potential lovers, and display their results on scales that indicate different levels of emotional arousal.

Offline hand-held popular meters are also available for the semi-cyber-literate consumer. These relics of a pre-cyber age respond to slight fingertip temperature changes and indicate passionateness on a scale from "pure passion" to "need help."

These two seemingly divergent images of human-affective-machine interaction--at MIT and beyond--resonate on multiple levels. They share a common technological foundation. They project a particular image of the body, of emotion, and their relationship. And they share the same cultural and social fantasies. More important, and despite the advertised image of a radical departure from traditional modes of human-machine interaction, they both hark back to the same late-nineteenth-century developments. Their contemporary applications and potential possibilities were, in fact, already partially anticipated by late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century experimenters. Their original developers projected a future in which affective sociability would be mediated by emotion-detecting technologies that transcribed affect in numeric or graphic forms.

In this essay I examine the genealogy of the numeral transformation of emotions from its earliest beginnings in the late nineteenth century. My objective is not to narrate this hundred-year history, but rather to study the modern encounter between emotion and number to highlight several hidden and tacit features of number and emotion as these emerged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

My main thesis is that the historical encounter between emotion and number should not be viewed solely as a particular instantiation of more general trends in the development of objectifying, quantifying, or even--as Ted Porter has recently argued--trust-building technologies (Porter, 1995). Rather, the numeral representation of emotions created a new type of emotion. The new emotion-as-number provided an alternative medium for the circulation and expression of emotions. It sanctioned an economy of emotional exchange and authorized affective communicability in a culture that, at least overtly, emphasized restraint and management of the affective self. In making this argument, I wish to challenge recent characterizations of post-Victorian "emotionology" as a culture of emotional restraint.