A Post-Digital Study of Extended Loneliness, Mediated Intimacy, and Emotional Gamification in Dave Eggers’ The Circle

Abstract

The paper explores Dave Eggers’ The Circle as a post-digital work to explore how hyperconnectivity and surveillance infrastructures are redefining emotional life in the current digital culture. Combining the post-digital theory, the cultural politics of emotion, and the economic reasoning of surveillance capitalism, the paper will assert that the novel narrates that affect is not a marginal effect of technological spread, though a central point of control. In a close analysis of the experiences that Mae Holland undergoes, the analysis determines that there are three interconnected phenomena, including extended loneliness, mediated intimacy, and emotional gamification, as structural conditions that the ecosystem of surveillance in the novel brings about. The results indicate that the long-term visibility destroys interiority that creates a sense of emptiness despite all the interaction; mediation by technology substitutes embodied connection with that of a performance more in line with the corporate ideology; and gamified emotional labour. The culture novel ends up being a caution concerning a culture, and it shows the emotional aftermath of a world in which connectivity is mandated and in which the self is streamlined to reflect surveillance economies.