Digital Emotions, Artificial Intelligence, and Embodied Interaction In Platform Societies

This session explores how emotions are produced, mediated, transformed, and circulated within digital environments, platform societies, and AI-driven interactions. Moving beyond approaches that treat digital emotions as simple online expressions of inner states, it invites contributions that examine emotions as socially, technologically, and culturally configured processes. Platforms, avatars, immersive environments, algorithms, and artificial intelligence do not merely host emotional life; they reshape the conditions through which emotions are recognized, performed, regulated, intensified, and shared. The session welcomes theoretical, methodological, and empirical papers on the relationship between emotional experience and digital mediation. Possible topics include digital embodiment and avatars; emotions in immersive environments; affective interaction with artificial intelligence; algorithmic amplification of anger, fear, empathy, love, shame, guilt, resentment, or trust; emotional labour on platforms; online rituals of recognition and belonging; digital intimacy and vulnerability; affective polarization; and the production of new emotional norms and moral expectations. Particular attention will be given to how digital technologies reconfigure the relationship between body, self, interaction, and society. How do avatars and AI systems transform emotional recognition and co-presence? How are emotions commodified, governed, or made visible through datafication? How do digital infrastructures shape collective memory, affective publics, and new forms of solidarity or conflict? The session brings together scholars in the sociology of emotions, digital sociology, symbolic interactionism, cultural sociology, media studies, science and technology studies, and critical theory. Its aim is to advance a sociological understanding of digital emotions as a key dimension of contemporary social life.