ISM BRIEFING #1
NOO EMOTIONS
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
ISM BRIEFING 1
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY New technology is generating unique experiences which people are trying to find a new language for Social Networking has magnified our self-expression, and shared emotion is the currency of the digital age A visual language of ‘Noo Emotions’ is emerging to capture these unprecedented experiences created by accelerated media and new technology The trend in “Reaction-Shot” TV and Film, where seeing the unfathomable emotional response of participants is the big payoff for the audience Business and Government are investing in technology to identify emotion subtly conveyed in facial expression
ISM (Image Source Monitor) is an Image Source research unit providing visual intelligence for our Art Directed shoots. Specialising in non-verbal communications ISM analysis and research sits behind the pictures we provide for over 200 distributors worldwide.
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NOO EMOTIONS
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
As our everyday language evolves so do the images which express those emotions. “OMG!” “LOLZ” “Whatever.” In a world where new technology is changing our world on a daily basis we create new words to describe new experiences and new emotions. The visual language is changing too and the ISM Briefing looks at the latest scientific research, the visual signs in advertising and pop culture, highlighting new directions in the visual language of emotions.
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arm around / female / friendship / hugging / crug
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NEW FEELINGS
1.0 New Feelings “Our attachment to our language is about emotion, not about intellect,” author and broadcaster Stephen Fry said recently in his BBC program, Planet Word, “Our identity is all about feelings.” Feelings and the language and images we use to picture them are being shaped and changed through our relationship with new technology. Research by ISM (Image Source Monitor) suggests that just as in the first great wave of technological revolution in the 19th century, when Charles Darwin conducted a photographic study of the emotions, to research and catalogue the emotional states of human, our new media technologies are generating a new visual language of emotions. The emoticon, for example, was a visual accompaniment invented by texters to expand the range of emotional notes when we discovered that texts and emails didn’t allow for emotional subtlety.
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NOO EMOTIONS
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NEW FEELINGS
PLAYSTALGIA: The pleasure of losing yourself in play, just like when you where a kid.
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bonding / togetherness / unity / shug
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TERROR TO INSPIRATION
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NOO EMOTIONS
1.1 21st Century: Terror to Inspiration The last decade with the rise of social networking has seen a huge transformation in our social interactions, making the 21st Century, The Age of Emotion. The decade began by being defined by Terror and by the end by being driven by Inspiration, from iconic images of destruction at the beginning of the decade to pictures of family and inspirational imagery posted and shared online by the end. Free-ranging updates of our emotional states, feelings about our lives, our friends, the work we find inspiring, in an update, in 140 characters, or in pictures has re-configured our relationship to the world. By March 2011 Twitter had 170 million tweets per day, Facebook currently has more than 800 million users with 250 million photos being uploaded everyday, while Instagram’s social network as visual self-expression, passed the benchmark recently of 150 million photos taken with 15 photos uploaded every second. And that’s from a network only a year old. We are more open, more passionate, more enthusiastic, more inspired, simply more emotive about postings, tweets, comments and likes. Shared emotions are the currency of the digital age, cementing online friendships and highly sought after by brands seeking to embed consumers within their emotional orbit.
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TERROR TO INSPIRATION
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NOO EMOTIONS
CROSSTALGIA: Deep anger that the present isn’t like the past
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TERROR TO INSPIRATION
SAPPINESS: an over-sentimental expression of happiness, prompted especially by underdogs winning on talent shows
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conflict / smoke / violence / mangry
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TERROR TO INSPIRATION
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REACTION SHOTS
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NOO EMOTIONS
1.2 Reaction Shots It’s no wonder that photos taken at Niagara Falls’ Nightmares Fear Factory of visitors scared out of their pants, became a media sensation, from The Tonight Show to ABC news to The Huffington Post. We’re increasingly curious about authentic visual expression of emotion partly because our online emotional life has become both so open but also so multi-layered, with our responses and feelings to posts collated, archived, tracked, like growth rings on a tree. It’s why apps launched in the last six months such as Intel’s Museum of Me to Facebook’s Timeline enabling users to create a visual autobiography through either curated images or images scraped up from their social network pages, have proved so popular. But offline too, talent shows such as the X-Factor have a narrative arc leading not to the contestants’ performances but to the reaction-shots, the faces of the judges, in shock, disbelief, and unexpected pleasure at a performance.
SMIRKOZY: Too self-assured exercise of power, a little smug, a combination of Merkozy and Merkel.
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REACTION SHOTS
WWWEROS: Love of the possibilities of digital dating.
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NOO EMOTIONS
CANALOG: the confident, creative feeling you get in your offline life, enjoying a craft such as knitting, playing sport, planting vegetables in you’re garden, or just shooting on an old film camera. A warm, non-digital, emotional glow
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REACTION SHOTS
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ANTICPIATION / jumping / confusion / Pre-Morse
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NETWORKS RESHAPE BRAINS
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NETWORKS RESHAPE BRAINS
1.3 Networks Reshape Brains ISM research reveals that social networking’s effect on the visual expression of emotions is not just a cultural one – it is physiological too. Recent scientific research shows that social networking is re-shaping our brains. The BBC in London reported on a scientific study funded by the Wellcome Trust and carried out by scientists at University College London, demonstrating a link between the number of friends someone has on their Facebook page with the amount of grey matter in regions of the brain connected to autism, memory and social interaction.
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NOO EMOTIONS
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READING FACES
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NOO EMOTIONS
Woecation: Anxiety when you discover that the person following your tweets says he’ll pop round and see you as he’s in the area. The downside of GPS location.
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READING FACES
1.4 Reading faces Meanwhile businesses and governments invest in technologies which enable them to visibly detect our emotions. Giga Om reports that MIT Media Lab spin-off Affectiva, has just got $5.67 million in funding for its software Affdex from Kantar, the consumer insights group for WPP. Using a database of facial expressions, the system analyses non-verbal communication on webcams to provide consumers’ responses to advertising, though Affectiva CEO Dave Berman enthused over its social applications. “Imagine playing video poker with an avatar that can read your face and tell if you’re bluffing,” he said. “The next big wave is interaction with social networking. Think about a social network that knew you liked something based on your face or physiological signals without you having to push a “like” button.”
Melight: the rush of pleasure when seeing a surge of likes for your blog/posts
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DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE AND EMOTION
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DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE AND EMOTION
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NOO EMOTIONS
1.5 Department of Defence And Emotion Recognising emotional expression has long been a useful tool for poker players, for salesmen, for people with good social skills. But it’s now also a matter of national security. It’s no longer a question of what a terrorist ‘looks like’, (quite often this has resulted in racial profiling) but what a terrorist is feeling, as new technology at airports analyses the involuntary emotional tics given away in facial expressions – dilated pupils, the wrinkling of the nose and apparently even ‘facial asymmetry’ are all give-aways of basic fears and distress. As Stephen Fry says, our identity is all about feelings.
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DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE AND EMOTION
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PALETTE OF FEELINGS
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PALETTE OF FEELINGS
1.6 Palette of Feelings In our accelerated culture, where fact is stranger than fiction, where new technology is radically creating new experiences of working, shopping, entertaining and interacting with each other, our emotional life is adapting to this social and technological transformation. ISM has been tracking the signs of this emerging palette of emotions in popular culture and for further information and data go to the IMSO website.
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CARAVAN / CHOICE / VACATION / HYPERBELONGING
NOO EMOTIONS Landmarks and Foundations Current examples of image-makers exploring new kinds of visual emotions.
Nightmares Fear Factory imagesource.com/blog/nightmare-photography-rush
Website Dear Photograph asks people to use a photograph from the past and insert it into a photo of the present. The site’s success is dues to its unusual mix of nostalgia for the past mashed with a desire to generate new emotional life through seeing old faces in a new moment in time.
Museum of Me imagesource.com/blog/intel-art-imitates-life Timeline imagesource.com/blog/facebooks-image-scrapbooking
dearphotograph.com
BBC in London report on Wellcome Trust study
After half-a-decade the We Feel Fine mood-visualization project by Jonathan Harris is still going strong. His software harvests emotions from blogs, locking onto the phrase “I feel” or ‘I am feeling”, pulling in the phrase then visualizing the feelings as an infographic The project begs the question, what do these feelings look like.
bbc.co.uk/news/health-15353397
wefeelfine.org Music promo The Greeks by Is Tropical, directed by French team Megaforce transforms a kids ‘shoot-em-up’ game into something incomprehensibly different simply through the addition of some animation layered on top of film. The reaction ranged from love/ hate too completely dumbfounded as to what the audience was supposed to feel about this playtime violence. youtube.com/watch?v=QwrbyVaC6EU Live the Language, a series of advertising videos for EF International Language Centers that has viral buzz, matches visualizes learning a new language pairing new words with new experiences. ef.co.uk/livethelanguage The recent genre of horror movies, (‘Horrumentary’) created around the idea of ‘found footage’ (‘Paranormal Activity’ the fictionalized documentary Last Exorcism) where viewers get to observe the barely readable emotional reactions to unprecedented experience. thelastexorcism.com
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APPENDIX NOTES: Snarky
Compressed Emotions
A word which emerged to describe a tone of voice, a journalistic feeling in media culture, a hipster emotion that mixes, snide, sarcasm, cynicism but in a strangely non-aggressive way. Jaded and weary rather than horrible and nasty. Snark can be interpreted as either sophisticated or stupid. Although New Yorker critic David Denby who wrote Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation, argues that it “prides itself on wit, but it’s closer to a leg stuck out in a school corridor that sends some kid flying.”
The guardians of grammar grumble about text-talk but esteemed renaissance man Stephen Fry makes the point that ‘If you look at the 18th century or 19th century letters written by Swift, Johnson, or by Byron, you will notice they speak in text-talk. Paper was very expensive, the posting of paper was immensely expensive … So people wrote ‘yr’ for ‘your’ and they compressed every word they possibly could’. Poets. Compressed language, compressed emotional concentrate?
Nosad
In cultures where emotional control is the norm, such as Japan, focus is placed on the eyes to interpret emotions, whereas in cultures where emotion is openly expressed, such as the United States, the focus is on the mouth to interpret emotion, according to a study by psychologist Masaki Yuki and colleagues.
Decoding Emotion
Psychologist Paul Ekman, one of TIME Magazines Top 100 most influential people of 2009, found that people in different cultures could identify the six basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust. But some languages have words for emotions that have no equivalent in other languages. Tahitians do not have a word for sadness. Germans have an idiosyncratic word, schadenfreude, indicating pleasure derived from the misfortune of others.
Emotional Pathology The term nostalgia literally means homesickness and was used in the eighteenth century to describe a medical condition.
Abraham Winkin’
Outside/Inside
A transcript of an Abraham Lincoln speech written in 1862 contains an emoticon ‘;)’, a winking smile. Or it could just be a typo.
The term ‘stiff upper lip’ was coined by an American.
Time and Emotion Study Mono no aware, literally translated as ‘the pathos of things’, is a Japanese term used to describe an awareness of the impermanence of things and a gentle sadness at their passing. The blossoms of the Japanese cherry tree are highly cherished because of their transience. They usually fall within a week of their first appearing and the evanescence of their beauty evokes the wistful feeling of mono no aware.
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NOO EMOTIONS Sappiness [sap-ee-nis]
Crug [kruhg]
noun
verb
1. An over-sentimental expression of happiness, prompted especially by underdogs winning on talent shows.
1. Crying and hugging, i.e. over-the-top emotional display, real and fake, very contemporary.
Crosstalgia [kros-stal-juh]
Shug [shuhg]
noun
verb
1. Deep anger that the present is not like the past. Made more annoying by the fact the past is all archived on the web.
1. The soft hug, i.e. pretence at intimacy, a Mediterranean-style warmth, but really a symbol of a failure to bond.
Canalog [ka-na-log]
Tweer [tweer]
noun
noun
1. The confident, creative feeling you get in your offline life, enjoying a craft such as knitting, playing sport, planting vegetables in your garden, or just shooting on an old film camera. A warm, non-digital emotional glow.
1. Fear of personal information being exploited online. Mangry [man-gree] adjective
Playstalgia [pley-stal-juh]
1. Fear of masculinity being threatened, expressed as rage. Mainly demonstrated online in the comments sections of newspaper articles.
noun 1. The pleasure of losing yourself in play, just like when you were a kid.
Hyperbelonging [hahy-pur-buh-lawng-ing]
Smirkozy [smur-koh-zee]
noun
noun
1. The intense feeling of warmth we get with online communities, particularly with loyal readers or followers of blogs.
1. Too self-assured exercise of power, a little smug, a combination of Merkozy and Merkel.
Facepooked [feys-pooked]
Cowelled [kou-wooled]
noun
noun
1. When you are creeped out by the stalking abilities of people on Facebook
1. Feeling judgmental, prickly, desire to be contrary.
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APPENDIX Pre-Morse [pree-mawrs]
Waterfalling [waw-ter-faw-ling]
noun
noun
1. When you regret what you know you are about to do, like responding to a Tweet in that first rush of feeling.
1. Like online surfing. The buzz you get when your tweet takes off in a rush of retweeting.
WWWeros [duhb-uhl-yoo-duhb-uhl-yoo-duhbuhl-yoo-eer-os]
Wrappy [rap-pee] noun
noun
1. That feeling of ultimate comfort you had as a baby. Wrapped up in a blanket, on the couch, drinking cocoa, and lovingly cocooned by your smartphone and tablet.
1. Love of the possibilities of digital dating. Grampy [gram-pee] noun 1. An irritable and mature beyond their years man. Melight [mee-lahyt] noun 1. The rush of pleasure when seeing a surge of likes for your blog or posts. Woecation [woh-key-shuhn] noun 1. Anxiety when you discover that the person following your twitter says they will pop round and see you as they are in the area. The downside of GPS location. Kinspiration [kin-spuh-rey-shuhn] noun 1. The feeling of seeing inspirational work posted by like-minded creatives.
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APPENDIX
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imagesource.com/blog