Below, Pamela Pavliscak shares five key insights from her new book, All the Feels: How to Stay Human in the Digital World.
Pamela is an associate professor at the Pratt Institute School of Information who studies how social media, phones, and AI are changing our emotional lives. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, NPR, and Fast Company.
What’s the Big Idea?
Conversations about technology assume that either the algorithms are broken or we are. But most of us live somewhere between these extremes. We build intimacy through playlists, absorb moods from social media feeds, and occasionally ask AI to help us write emotionally complicated texts. Despite all the panic about distraction and brain rot, people are surprisingly inventive in digital spaces. All the Feels is a guide to the informal strategies people develop to stay emotionally aware and fully human in an always-on world.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Pamela herself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.
1. The internet expanded our emotional vocabulary.
One of the most creative things happening online is that people keep inventing new feelings. Terms can come from researchers trying to make sense of emerging behaviors. Orthosomnia, for instance, occurs when tracking your sleep disrupts it. Many other expressions, like sadfishing or hyperempathy, emerge collectively until everyone seems to understand a feeling that previously had no name.
Every year, the dictionaries race to catalog internet-inspired emotional vocabulary like goblin mode, main character energy, or brain rot. The language arrives so quickly because the emotional experiences themselves are evolving quickly. We are responding to these enormous changes the way we always have—by trying to narrate what life feels like from the inside out.
Sociologists call these neo-emotions, new words for new emotional experiences, often shaped by new social conditions. And, in this case, new technologies. These new emotion words can seem like silly fads, but there’s more to it.
Research on emotional granularity shows that people who can identify feelings with greater precision regulate their emotions more effectively and experience less stress. Saying “I’m in my NPC era” or calling yourself “feral” may sound a little “delulu,” but it’s also a way of transforming inner experience into something we can make sense of together.
AI is now entering the chat, too. The latest submission to the internet emotion lexicon is AI brain fry, a kind of cognitive meltdown with emotional side effects. It comes from outsourcing just enough thinking to feel both hyper-productive and slightly hollowed out. Half joke, half confession, new emotion words help us smuggle truth past embarrassment.
2. Digital life has its own love languages.
The original love languages were invented in a world before relationships unfolded through a combination of voice notes and location sharing. In my research, I began to notice recurring patterns in how people stay close online. I think of them as digital love languages.
- Pebbling: named after penguins who will offer a special stone to a special penguin friend. For us, it’s more like sending your girlfriend a Zillow listing to a fantasy apartment or emailing your mom a video of a cat taking care of baby ducklings.
- Phonnecting: the antithesis of phubbing (when you snub the person right in front of you by being on your phone). If you’ve ever flopped down on the bed, side-by-side, each of you airdropping photos into a shared drive after a day of sightseeing, you’ve phonnected.
- Looping: those predictable little rituals like the “made it home safe” message or a Friday selfie check-in. Relationships are increasingly sustained through these small acts of attention.
Current screen time debates are missing this part of the story. Not all time online feels the same. And a growing body of social science research suggests that how we spend our time online is more important than how much time we spend online. So, while it’s true that passive scrolling can be draining, intentional forms of attunement can leave us feeling more connected and less alone.
3. Feelings move between us online.
Somehow, we feel everything and nothing all at once online. You know that feeling when you open social media in a perfectly decent mood and twenty minutes later, you’re emotionally overcaffeinated? That’s what I mean. We pick up feelings from each other, often without realizing.
The shift can be dramatic, like watching outrage ripple through comment sections until you feel invested in an argument you didn’t even start. More often, it’s subtle. A midnight glance at Slack and, as soon as you see that constellation of green dots, you feel a queasy lurch of micro-guilt.
There are many theories about emotion. For a long time, we thought faces could tell us all we needed to know. Neuroscientists emphasize the brain’s role. Sociologists find feelings in the culture. One important theory says that feelings don’t simply live inside us; they materialize through interactions. You can feel the energy inside a fast-moving text thread just as easily as you would pick up excitement in a crowded concert hall. The internet didn’t invent this dynamic, but it did make emotional contagion faster, louder, and harder to escape.
People sense this intuitively, and they’re developing informal methods to shift the emotional atmosphere online. Some people become what I half-jokingly call vibe whisperers. These are the friends who can defuse an argument with one perfectly timed meme. The rest of us protect the vibe on the fly, say, by fleeing from LinkedIn to Pinterest for psychic recovery. Online mood is shaped by ordinary people, maybe even more so than by algorithms.
4. Emotion is embodied, even on the internet.
Anyone who is up at three in the morning doomscrolling knows all too well that the body keeps score. I learned this hosting an open tabs night, where a group of us assembled online to purify our attention by clearing our browsers. One person wondered aloud why their jaw was tensing up. I noticed I was holding my breath, just a little bit, as I weighed closing that tab about how to avoid burnout.
That phenomenon is called screen apnea. There are other physical states with emotional repercussions. At this point, it’s safe to say we’ve all experienced phantom vibration syndrome, which is the sensation that your phone buzzed even when it didn’t. Our feelings still move through bodies that evolved long before notifications were even a thing.
People devise methods to bring the physical back into the digital world all the time. We fill in for missing nonverbal cues with reaction GIFs like “kombucha girl” which perfectly captures the emotional rollercoaster we so often feel. Crying videos can perform sadness, for sure, but sometimes let us in on moments of raw vulnerability. Then there’s very specific emotional distinction between “haha,” “lol,” and “lmao.” Oh, and I guess the skull emoji now too. Entire online emotional grammars compensate for the fact that we can’t see each other’s faces or hear the pauses between words.
“People devise methods to bring the physical back into the digital world all the time.”
Wherever possible, people introduce sensory elements to make online experience feel visceral. Some build calming nighttime routines around cozy games and aquarium livestreams while others chase intensity through surreal AI-generated fruit-slicing videos and bass-heavy edits that make walking to Trader Joe’s feel like the climax of a coming-of-age film.
I started thinking of these impulses as two enduring emotional modes online. A stoic impulse is focused on managing overwhelm. A more romantic outlook seeks immersion. This may sound slightly dramatic for an era powered largely by memes and AirPods, but these very old cultural frames can explain how we move through very new technologies.
5. We’re improvising new ways to feel human.
The larger discussion around technology assumes that platforms manipulate us, algorithms flatten us, and AI diminishes us—that’s it, end of story. Because I’ve worked in the industry, I know that technology’s design matters. There’s no disputing that right now it’s not designed for our emotional well-being. I also know that feelings change as technology changes, whether we are talking about the telephone or the text bubble.
When you look closely at how people live online, you see humans reverse-engineering emotional survival strategies in real time. People mute chaotic group chats not because they hate their friends, but because they know their nervous system can’t survive 47 unread messages before coffee. Teenagers maintain elaborate Notes app systems for processing friendship drama. Families develop emotional rituals around sharing their Wordle scores. And now AI is introducing a new layer of weirdness, where we rehearse difficult conversations prior to having them. Even before we have stable cultural norms or technological guardrails, we are developing instincts about what qualifies as emotional support and what is emotional outsourcing.
I don’t think the future of emotional life will be decided by whether we log off forever or merge consciousness with chatbots in a synthetic utopia. It will depend on whether we learn to participate in digital life more intentionally and with enough emotional awareness to recognize what helps us feel more human.
Enjoy our full library of Book Bites—read by the authors!—in the Next Big Idea App:
