I think that social media is changing the ways

both in which we experience the emotions of other people

and how we express our emotions publicly.

I think the main thing you have to think about in social media

is that our emotions are a valuable resource.

So it behoves the people who are designing social media networks -

such as Twitter, Facebook -

to make our emotions as clearly obvious

and evident to others as possible.

So you may have noticed on Facebook,

one of the first questions you're greeted with is,

"What's on your mind?"

Couple of years ago I noticed sort of a comedy of errors

that's brewing in our emotional landscape with social media.

So in the same year, Facebook finally rolled out its six reaction features.

So instead of just simply liking things that your friends have posted,

you could add the heart or the sad face or the angry face.

Mark Zuckerberg at the time said,

"What people want to do is express empathy."

But this empathy was again channelled into a discrete set of emotions

that weren't limitless or boundless.

Now why this is a funny sort of irony,

is that in that same year a robot was released onto the market

by a company called Hanson Robotics, and the robot was called Pepper.

And robots such as these were being trained to recognise and I quote,

"62 different facial and neck architectural features of humans."

So while the robots were learning 62 different ways to recognise us,

and to be able to tell what emotions we were feeling,

we were being allowed a range of six emotions on social media.

I'm sure you've noticed this too,

that on social media we're asked to experience

two completely different kinds of emotions one after the other.

So on your timeline you may see that your best friend's child

is sort of toddling around on the carpet.

You may feel the warmth and excitement of that.

And then the next post could be something about

7,000 killed in an earthquake.

The way that the timeline and the news feeds are structured

really have no emotional consistency at all.

So we're often being jerked in our effective responses

from one emotion to the next quite quickly.

And I think this century will be about how do we cope

with these quick gear changes in our emotional lives.

Where people's internal landscapes are being altered

very, very radically from one emotion to the next.

Really the name of the game in social media commerce

is to make your time on the site as maximum as possible.

So a lot of the ways that the websites are designed

to encourage you to stay on it, to return to it,

and how they do that is to create quite addictive

little algorithms, such as there's one where on Twitter

there's a bit of a delay before how many notifications you have come up.

And there's a very human, basic response there,

where we wait to see something that is variable and changing.

We get a little hit of dopamine,

when there's a category of data that is changing that we can monitor.

So there's that brief moment of excitement that we all know

even when we're just checking an email,

"How many new emails do I have?" "How many notifications?"

And that little pause encourages in us that sort of sense of anticipation

that is then rewarded when we see the actual number.

So in this way, social media is trying to tap in

to very fundamental things about how our psychologies work

and our emotional lives are structured.

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