Empathic media, emotions and gamification: from the Fourth Industrial Revolution to the postpandemic society.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution represents the most advanced frontier of technological innovation that will transform the economy of the future in a disruptive way, introducing new devices such as: self-guided vehicles, 3D printing, advanced robotics, new materials, digital platforms, gene editing etc. The expression "empathic media" means not only the platforms and devices that develop forms of "emotional artificial intelligence", but also all those innovations who have been able to enhance the emotional nature of the human being in commercial terms. The ever closer relationship between emotions, artificial intelligence and creativity represents a dominant trend of our time that can be examined, for example, by comparing the recent cinematographic imagination with some innovations on the market. Through this comparison we can understand the way in which new technologies enhance the emotional dimension that has become a central aspect not only in human-machine interaction but also more generally of a new concept of design, communication and consumption. By analyzing the social context created as a consequence of the coronavirus, we discuss a classification based on three scenarios that it seems they can work as interpretative models of the relation between technology and everyday life: 1) Isolation, 2) Integration and 3) Co-design. Each of them is expressed as a form of experience in which the media are the medium and therefore the environment capable of creating, nurturing and hosting particular feelings and emotions. The media are transfigured as empathic tools because they allow "suffering together", as the etymology of the term prefigures, producing different types of experiential sharing.