All the Feels summary

Communicating online invites us to amplify. It’s why, under a funny video, comments tend towards  “omg dying” rather than a mild “haha.” Why does this happen? Well, without expressions or intonation, text loses the signals that carry feeling. Online,  we compensate with a more-is-more toolkit: exclamation marks in clusters, streeeetched vowels, ALL CAPS for a shout, and a supply of emojis and GIFs standing in for the expressions we can’t show.

In face-to-face talk, expressions, gestures, and tone are central to conveying meaning, and early researchers of online communication feared that stripping them out would breed miscommunication. Instead, people adapted. A smiling emoji, brain-imaging suggests, lights up many of the same regions as a real face. Our new, online way of speaking is effective at conveying emotion.

In June 2022, an artist named Chi Nguyễn tweeted a small domestic crisis: two ceramic bowls, stacked while washing up, had sealed themselves together, and she couldn't prise them apart. Within days the internet was gripped. She logged failed remedy after failed remedy – hot water, ice, WD-40, aggressive shaking – while strangers flooded in with suggestions, a former NASA engineer offered help, and someone built a website for the cause. A stuck bowl became, briefly, a shared event.

The sociologist Émile Durkheim had a name for that feeling. In 1912 he called it collective effervescence: the heightened energy and unity that surges when a community turns its attention to the same thing at once. He was describing religious rituals and gatherings. The emotion needn’t be joy; grief or shared outrage count too, so long as it’s intense and felt together. Marathons, concerts, a stadium roar: same mechanism. The internet, for all its talent for division, turns out to be remarkably good at generating this effervescence, too.

Social media platforms sell themselves on one word: connection. Facebook wants to “bring the world closer together”; LinkedIn counts your “connections” like trophies. And yet here is the paradox at the heart of modern life: the very devices that promise to connect us are often the ones pushing us apart.

Start with the word itself. Connection is just the link. But there’s a richer thing it’s meant to deliver, which we might call attunement: the quality of attention flowing across that link, the sense of being noticed and understood. You can have thousands of connections without experiencing attunement. A follower count is not the feeling of someone getting you. Being surrounded by contacts is not the same as feeling connected.

The infinite scroll promises infinite variety. In reality, the deluge of online content has a flattening effect. Scroll for two minutes and you’ll pass war footage, then a cat video, then someone’s lunch, then a house fire, then a joke. Everything arrives in the same frame, at the same size, demanding the same quick reaction. We use the same crying emoji to mourn a death and to lament a discontinued cereal. 

Part of the problem is sensory. Screens are relentlessly flat. Every online experience is delivered in the same glowing rectangle, the same pixels, whatever the content. It’s desensitized. And this desensitization is playing havoc with our emotional lives. Emotion was never purely mental. It’s bodily. Over a century ago, William James argued the sequence runs backwards from what we assume: we don’t tremble because we’re afraid, we feel afraid because we tremble: the body’s response comes first, and the feeling follows from it. Strip out the body, flatten every sensation to a screen, and something in emotional life goes thin. 

So where does all this go next? If the current technology has been reshaping our emotional lives from inside our phones, the next wave moves closer still – onto our faces, around our wrists, and into conversations with machines that seem to care.

Start with the most striking arrival: AI companions. Apps like Replika and Character.AI now hold tens of millions of users, and between 2022 and mid-2025 the number of such apps surged by around 700 percent. They offer something seductive – a listener who never tires, never judges, is always awake at 3 a.m. And the research is genuinely, honestly split. Some studies find that even brief interactions with AI companions can provide real emotional relief and ease loneliness; others, tracking people over time, find that heavier chatbot use predicts more loneliness, not less. The likely truth is that it depends – on the person, the design, and whether the bot supplements human contact or replaces it.