Abstract
This paper reexamines the concept of “feeling rules” through the analysis of deliberations upon emotional experiences in computer-based grief support networks. Media studies have increasingly come to notice and puzzled by the fact that the mere presence of communication technologies in social interaction changes the ways we experience and express our feelings. In this regard, Hochschild's work on feeling rules provides an excellent point of departure suggesting that emotional experiences are regulated by a set of feeling rules appropriate to each setting of interaction. However, like many other studies in the field of the sociology of emotion, it is predominantly concerned with face-to-face interaction without paying due attention to the context of mediated communication as if face-to-face interaction were the prototype of interaction per se. Therefore it cannot fully understand the implications of the increasing use of communication technology in the construction of emotional experiences. In order to fill this gap and identify the role of technology in the organization of mediated communication, this paper supplements her theory of feeling rules by introducing the concept of social boundaries that intervene in the association between feeling rules and settings.
