Chasing the Research Object: Social Policies and Emotions in Virtual Spaces

Abstract

Pursuing our object of study in virtual spaces has allowed us to observe different feelings, senses, and practices that occur in transit through state interventions, as well as breaking dualistic or dichotomous views which separate ways of seeing and doing. The objective of this chapter is to review the modes of social research regarding emotions and social policies in virtual environments. To do this, we revisit the notions of field, space, co-presence, online and offline. Re-thinking our objects and the methods for approaching them in 4.0 societies implies transcending the epistemological obstacle of the real/virtual split. In this sense, we present virtual environments as places where interactions and copresence are located as hybrid spaces, where state interventions and their implementation processes take on materiality. Second, we explore the field of studies of emotions on the web, identifying, on the one hand, the potential of environments that present certain emotional architectures and, on the other hand, how emotions are configured in various virtual spaces. To this we add individual and collective investigations about social policies, exhibiting more continuities than ruptures in the emotions of the “onlife” world.