Kind of Blue

In this article, Michelle Henning considers the use of emotion recognition and sentiment analysis on social media photographs as part of a regime of surveillance and control. Automated emotion recognition studies reduce social media photographs to data, reading them as symptoms of mental states. This goes against the historical idea of the photograph as objective and detached, but corresponds with a contemporary therapeutic sense of self. Henning acknowledges that people use social photos expressively, but argues that emotion recognition techniques rely on a behaviourist and positivist model that is indifferent to intentions and fails to take culture into account.