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Our contemporary life is full of resonances. You buy a mood lamp to set the mood, browse a shopping site that sells “Tuscan vibes,” or walk into a room and immediately feel that the party has a lively vibe.
However, when one asks where this vibe comes from, the answer becomes murky. Is it under the light? Not exactly. Light blends into the room, blending with sounds, colors and furniture. It’s not just one thing. The atmosphere is elusive. It spreads, penetrates and connects. it is located relation Between things – how people, sounds and materials work together to create a shared feeling.
This is where literary and philosophical thinkers come into play. For decades, they’ve been exploring this elusive feeling—the collective emotions that organize everyday life, even if we can’t quite name them.
Thinking hard about atmosphere reveals something crucial: Feelings are a form of shared knowledge shaped by context—a human experience that may be even more important as technology advances.
Long before resonance had a name
The term itself is of recent origin. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “vibe” emerged in the 1960s and is an abbreviation of “vibration” in American slang, used to describe the emotional energy emanating from a person or place.
To say that something “resonates” means that your body vibrates to it in a specific way. It’s not just a thought, but a physical adjustment: the space, sound, or presence around you has moved you, subtly changing the way you feel.
Of course, philosophers have long been interested in the same experience, although they called it by different names. Long before “atmosphere” entered everyday parlance, thinkers were using words like this: atmosphere or atmosphere to describe the shared feelings that fill a space and shape our responses to it.
In this sense, Vibe updates an age-old philosophical question: How does the world around us allow itself to be perceived, rather than just known?
About the author
Lei Yu is a doctoral student in comparative literature at Western University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. read Original article.
One of the first modern critics to take the issue seriously was the Welsh cultural theorist Raymond Williams, who coined the term “emotional structures” in 1954. Williams believed that every historical moment had its own emotional texture; That feeling of living in that era.
It’s not a single emotion, but a background buzz that connects people before they can describe it. Think of the optimism of the 1950s or the political turmoil of the 1960s, similar to what we are experiencing now. We can feel emotions immediately.
For Williams, this “structure of feeling” is what makes art and culture important. They not only recorded people’s thoughts, but also recorded the feelings of life.
Engineering feels business
Decades later, the German philosopher Gernot Böhme gave substance to this idea. exist Atmospheric aestheticshe believes that atmosphere is something we encounter rather than imagine.
Walking into a cathedral, a café or a shop, the air itself gives you a different feeling. Your senses are triggered and combine to shape the way you experience the atmosphere. Boehme believed that atmosphere exists in the space between object and subject, sound and listener, light and body.
Companies and marketers know this better than anyone. What they sell is not just objects, but a world of emotions.
When you walk into a boutique, you’re greeted not by bright displays but by a carefully calibrated atmosphere. The aroma fills the air and the salesperson asks if you want to try it. By answering, you’ll be lulled into the illusion that the perfume itself creates the feeling you’re feeling, when in fact it’s the entire scent—soft jazz, citrus wood notes—that moves you.
We are surrounded by these designed environments and we know that the same scents will not move us in the same way elsewhere.
Brands no longer sell perfume or soap, but an aura of belonging. They provide a shared world that we learn to know and desire through our senses. This commercial climate reminds us that our emotional lives are increasingly shaped by design.
Why sensing the atmosphere is still a human thing
As AI becomes increasingly capable of performing tasks we once called creative — writing, composing, painting — it’s also changing the way we think about perception itself.
If machines can analyze patterns and generate words or images, then perhaps what is unique to humans is not our ability to produce things, but our ability to feel them. Capturing a tone of voice, noticing how light changes on a face, or sensing the mood of a room are all forms of knowledge that algorithms cannot replicate.
This doesn’t mean that AI and feeling are necessarily antithetical. As we outsource more of our labor to manual systems, the art of cultivating and interpreting atmosphere may become even more important.
Learning to name an emotion, and paying attention to how space and technology shape emotion, may be a way for us to remain alert to our connections as humans. If artificial intelligence teaches us efficiency, then atmospheric thinking teaches us sensitivity. It reminds us that meaning doesn’t just live in data or design, but in the air between us—the moods we create together, the atmosphere, the atmosphere we learn to share.