Emotions and Expressions:

If you ever have been to Disney, Pixar movies with your friends or kids, you know exactly what I am talking about. That’s right. Watching those animated characters doing life like things laughing, giggling, flying, fighting etc makes you feel amused and amazed. You feel happy when you walk out of the movie. Going to movies of different genre evokes different emotional response within ourselves trickled by body sensory movements affecting brain impulses to generate various emotional responses based on what you see and hear. Its about what you feel “inside” or sometimes referred as “gut” feeling or desire which actually govern your cognitive and non-cognitive decisions.

Similarly expressions or the Body Language is one other response our brain generates depending on the situation or place like while driving car or cracking a joke with your friends while having a beer.

Body language comprises of movements of hands, palms, legs, posture including facial expressions of you while you are in conversation with someone in real life.

Why Emotions matter in Digital world more than anything else

We are more connected than ever with our friends, family and loved ones. We establish personal relationships with these connections and cherish them when get to meet them or talk to them. We remember all the talks, funny moments when we are interacting with them while having dinner, drinking beer or just watching a NFL game night with them.

But if you think about it, what happens in our virtual world surrounded by Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat is really astounding. We settle down. We are ok with a plain text message or a photograph on an Instagram page that shows what are we upto. And a Like or Emoticon would be sent to denote how you feel about those moments in their lives.

How can a Like or Emoticon justify your emotions and expression and mimic the same experience as you would have seen when you would have met them face to face.

Lets analyze why Emoticons were born. They were born because of the sheer need and desire for people to be more “expressive” of their emotions. Emoticons, codify our emotions, like an alphabet does to letters and dictionary does to words. These are the same emotions that everybody recognizes which you can transmit virtually. That used to be okay, back when virtual space and reality were walled from each other. But this is no longer the case, and blurred lines have changed the game. Our lives are a streaming series of interactions based in both the virtual and real. We make friends, take photos, listen to music, and it’s all accessible in our life stream. I no longer end conversations with my closest friends. We don’t say goodbye because in a given day our conversation will move from twitter to Facebook to texting to seeing each other in real life. That blurred line means that those definitions of virtual and real no longer hold true. I’m sure you’ve heard of apps that use augmented reality — but really, aren’t our entire lives an augmented reality now? I reference a Vine video at lunch and then immediately pull it up on my iPhone. Isn’t that projecting the virtual in a real space?

Are we really becoming emotionally disengaged as human species?

If you look closely, the influence of social media, internet and virtual world have made us feel less sensitive of the events, milestones and important moments of our and everyones’ lives. We spend more time liking the post/picture than we spend to enjoy that moment with our friends. Getting more followers on Instagram or Twitter is the new norm. Does that mean we as a nation are becoming emotionally disengaged?

Well what the big deal with that you might ask? Emotions rules decision making, every decision we make through our cognitive brain is preceded by emotional justification. Emotional state controls how we act, behave and be productive in real life. Are we doing enough to make sure virtual world and its life helps us to maintain or uplift our emotional state or be more productive while engaging with our loved ones?

We are spending more than 4 hrs everyday of our lives(with loved ones) interacting in digital lives with no emotional connection whatsoever. With so much technological advancement, it is incumbent upon us to fix this problem for the better of the future…

How Soon?

A Burning question for which I “FEEL” we need to fix for our future generations…..