Arlie Hochschild’s The Managed Heart was the focus of my “Great Books” graduate seminar last Friday. It is a beautifully written, painstakingly conceived, and imaginatively argued volume–one of the three books I knew for sure had to be on the syllabus as soon as this course got approved. The core of the book is Hochschild’s research of the work of flight attendants–how they are trained by the airlines to manage their emotions and those of their passengers. It is what she calls “emotional labor.” That provocative phrase signals one of Hochschild’s major contributions to the field: making emotions and feelings central to the study of social interaction and work and social life more generally. And there are other  field-shaping insights as well. For example, she makes a powerful, gendered argument about the disproportionate weight of feeling work falling to women in contemporary society. And in an audacious and under-appreciated final chapter Hochschild suggests that the quest for authenticity through purity of emotional expression and experience is a unique facet of contemporary, late modern social life.

Anyway, I was so taken with the book I began looking around for news stories or current events that would provide an excuse to blog about the book. I didn’t have to look far. I quickly stumbled onto a New York Times profile of Arturo Bejar, Facebook’s “Mr. Nice.”

Bejar is the head–Director of Engineering, appears to be his official title–of Facebook’s “Protect and Care” team, an 80 person department whose job it is to ensure that Facebook users “play nice.” A lot of their work, according to the profile, seems to be to get users to edit or retract comments that cause or appear to cause harm to other users of the site. But an even more basic and challenging part of the job is to develop techniques–questions, prompts, check-off-boxes–that allow the team to figure out whose feelings have been hurt in the first place “let people know someone had hurt their feelings.”  Teenagers, according to the story, are the care team’s focus. This is not just because they are more likely to be victims of cyber-mistreatment, but because they “sometimes lack the emotional maturity to handle negative posts.”  Researchers working with the Facebook team have helped the group find more “pathways” and “options” for “voicing their feelings” online. They are encouraged to talk about “what’s happening in a post, how they feel about it, and how sad they are.” They are also presented with text boxes with polite, pre-written responses that can be sent to friends who hurt their feelings.”

In other words, the work of Bejar’s team is all about the management of their users feelings and emotions. Talk about emotional labor and the management of feeling, and in high-tech, ultra-modern corporate environment to boot! Do you feel it? The connection that links flight attendants to Facebook, I mean?