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Technology and Love
By Rosie Perera | March 27, 2012 at 11:19 pm
Great article from last year, but I just stumbled upon it today: Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts. by Jonathan Franzen (New York Times, May 28, 2011)
Love is hard-won and difficult and involves pain, but is rewarding and totally worth it. On the other hand, “our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful.” “[T]he ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.” “[T]he world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and…it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.”
Can consumer technology drive us to real love, can it facilitate real love, is it an alternative to or even a threat to real love? Is our love of it (rather our “like” of it) indifferent to and merely parallel to real love in our lives? Can we truly love technology in the way Franzen describes loving birds? What would that look like, and what would we sacrifice if we did? Would it be worth it?
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