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[upbeat music] Hi, I'm Pamela Pavliscak, and I study emotional life on the Internet.

Over the past decade, I've collected diaries documenting life online.

There are videos from young people who use TikTok as therapy and voice notes from moms who text their kids from the next room just to keep the peace.

Once, I even received a note from a rather serious older gentleman who confessed that a chatbot conversation helped him to finally grieve.

I've seen firsthand the richness and complexity of feeling in our current hybrid digital physical world.

And yet, that complicated emotional reality is rarely reflected back to us.

And when you use our link, you're supporting our show.

Is there anything else we can do, y- you know, other than you say, like, pushing more positive things out there, to mitigate these effects?

Yeah.

Well, I think, you know, one thing we talk about a lot is how the technology is designed, and that certainly does have an impact.

And there could be changes made if business models were changed so that we didn't have infinite scroll or liking.

And a lot of the platforms have actually experimented with that.

But I don't think that's gonna 100% solve the problem, because that doesn't really affect the content that's shared and how that might activate us.

So I always think i- it's best to be intentional.

[laughs]

Mm

... um, and looking at how people are using language to kind of help them through difficult emotions, or share in emotions, just like we do when we learn any kind of new emotion word.

And I was like, well, that's really astonishing because I think that happens on the internet all the time.

We invent a really specific emotion word.

And now some of them come from experts, right? And from academic study.

Like there's cyberchondria.

We don't just walk around talking about like, oh, we, you know, become convinced that we have a terrible disease from talking with ChatGPT or [laughs] searching Google or whatever, but we've all probably done it.

Mm