Picking at digital daisies: Wattpad, teenage girls and stories

Author's note (AN): Read this before continuing

To understand everything you are about to read, and why I am writing it, we need to talk about emotions, in a more theoretical sense.

What are emotions? No, really, what are they? A real, tangible substance? An amalgamation of different responses we have lumped together? A physical reaction? A static image? Stones, trees, flowers?

Emotions are a complicated thing; and not only when detangling them in therapy. Emotions are complex overall. How do you pinpoint them? Could you show me something and go 'there, that right there is an emotion? No, you couldn't. No one could. You could, of course, show me something and go 'there, that right there gives me emotions' or even 'there, that right there is a person expressing an emotion' but emotions are more complex than that. Way more complex than that.

When talking about emotions you could consider an 'inside out' (AN: Yes, like the movie) approach. That is to say you feel your emotions inside and externalise them, be it by doing an action (crying, smiling, frowning) or by saying something ('I am' statements can be really good for that). This, according to Ahmed (2014), is the psychological way of understanding emotions. This is the way most of us are more familiarised to think of them: something you have, almost fully formed, inside of your own personal self and then you share with the world.

Great! Now, (I am going to take this experiment almost straight from Ahmed because it made everything clear the first time I read it), imagine there's a little girl that wanders into the forest and sees a bear just standing there. She gets scared and runs away.

Easy enough: she saw the bear, it scared her, she ran.

Now, let's focus on one specific sentence "it scared her". Did it, though? The bear was just there. The bear did absolutely nothing to her, so why is she scared?

She is scared because she knows to be scared; because someone, somewhere, taught her that bears are meant to be feared. The emotions she felt had been moulded by the experiences she already had, not the present experience of the encounter with the bear. The emotions she felt were not created by her but by the sociocultural environment she grew up in.

Emotions, how we understand them and what we do with them, are informed by the world we live in.

Some people would then argue that this could mean that we should think about an 'outside in' model, in which these emotions should be considered as practices that are imposed socioculturally on us. Ahmed goes a step further and talks about how emotions are created in the contact between subject and object, shaped by lived experiences and a lot of very important stuff (Ahmed, 2014). That is not important right now. What matters, for the rest of the parts you are going to read, is that emotions are not static, and they are most definitely not innate. The way we feel is entirely shaped by the world we live in; it is just another social practice we keep repeating.