Digital Inequality as a Driver of Emotional Alienation

Abstract

Dominant discourses often reduce digital inequality to technological access and attribute emotional alienation to individual psychology. This desocialized view obscures the problem's core. From a social-philosophical perspective, drawing on Axel Honneth, Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. This paper reveals how digital technologies reshape social structures and human coexistence. It argues that digital platforms, algorithmic sorting, and data accumulation collectively reconfigure social relations. Groups lacking adequate digital representation suffer systemic misrecognition, which forms the structural basis of emotional alienation. Through critical social theory, this paper analyzes the intrinsic link between digital inequality and emotional alienation to provide theoretical resources for a more inclusive digital society