BORED, LONELY, ANGRY, STUPID

This wide-ranging account of our emotional responses to technologies, from the telegram to Instagram, shows that technology not only changes how we feel, but what our feelings mean.

Facebook makes people lonely. Selfies breed narcissism. On Twitter and comment boards, hostility reigns. Pundits and psychologists warn us that digital technologies substantially alter our emotional states. But in this lively and surprising account, we learn that technology doesn't just affect how people can feel from moment to moment—it changes profoundly the underlying emotions themselves.

Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid examines nineteenth- and twentieth-century letters, diaries, and memoirs and draws on contemporary research and interviews with Americans of different ages and backgrounds to document how emotions have been transformed by technological change. Where Americans now strive to escape boredom, earlier generations saw unstructured time as an opportunity for productivity and creativity. Where loneliness is now pathologized, people once thought of solitude as virtuous. Even as some ask whether technology makes one lonelier, it is altering the meaning of loneliness.

As a political theorist and software developer who has written and spoken extensively about the impact of technology on education, Luke Fernandez has grappled with many of these questions in the computer lab and classroom. As a social historian, Susan Matt has chronicled the evolution of American conceptions of envy, loneliness, and homesickness. In this timely book, they contend that current technology has removed many of the limits on the emotional landscape. Thus people seek to be constantly stimulated, engaged, and validated, while their anger and antisocial impulses are not only unconstrained but are affirmed by the digital company they keep.

Luke Fernandez is Assistant Professor in the School of Computing and co-director of the Tech Outreach Center at Weber State University. His essays on the effects of the internet on higher education have appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Susan J. Matt is Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University. She has appeared on many radio programs, including To the Best of Our Knowledge on Wisconsin Public Radio,
KBYU's Thinking Aloud, and the CBC's Tapestry, and her work has been recognized in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Slate, and Washington Post, among others.