“Digital Echoes and Poetic Memory: Reimagining Human Emotion in the Age of Screens

Abstract

Human emotion is being mediated, archived and transformed by the screens more and more in the modern digital age. Social media feeds to memory feedbacks at the hands of a computer AI, digital technologies have transformed how people feel and share, as well as retain feelings. The paper covers the overlap of digital culture and poetic memory whereby experience of emotion is recreated in a technologically saturated atmosphere. The research is based on media theory, research on memory and digital humanities, the work explores how digital platforms serve as storage of affect, how poetic performance is transformed to screen communication and how memory becomes an algorithmically mediated experience. However, the argument of the paper is that, although screens can be dangerous in terms of muddying emotional expressiveness due to the process of commodification and acceleration, they also open the possibility of new poetic space through fragmented, hybrid and interactive expressive forms of emotion. Finally, the paper will suggest that digital echoes permanent residues of human association are a novel kind of collective poetic memory in the twenty-first century.