From the Los Angeles Review of Books
by Anna Lauren Hoffmann & Luke Stark
“Meet the little voices inside your head,” suggests one of the taglines for Pixar’s latest hit, Inside Out. From the perspective of five discrete emotions, the film follows the struggles of Riley, a preteen girl coping with her family’s cross country move to San Francisco....
At the risk of sounding like killjoys, however, we think Inside Out represents a potentially dangerous line of thinking. While great for selling movie tickets, the film’s depiction of emotions, memory, and the brain in general provides a poor model for teaching people of all ages about how their minds work. More alarmingly, the film reveals just how deeply digital technologies are reshaping — and not for the better, we believe — how we understand our mental and emotional lives....
Anna Lauren Hoffmann is a postdoctoral scholar at the School of Information, studying information, culture, and ethics.