Love in Contemporary Technoculture

Abstract

This Element outlines the environments of loving in contemporary technoculture and explains the changes in the manner of feelings (including the experience of senses, spaces, and temporalities) in technologically mediated relationships. Synchronic and retrospective in its approach, this Element defines affection (romance, companionship, intimacy etc.) in the reality marked by the material and affective 'intangibility' that has emerged from the rise of digitalism and technological advancement. Analysing the (re)constructions of intimacy, it describes our sensual and somatic experiences in conditions where the human body, believed to be extending itself by means of the media and technological devices, is in fact the extension of the media and their technologies. It is a study that outlines shifts and continuums in the 'practices of togetherness' and which critically rereads late modern paradigms of emotional and affective experiences, filling a gap in the existing critical approaches to technological and technologized love.

Technocultures and Glocalization

“…Still, it is not free from political and economic issues, shaping the global background. Technoculture epitomizes, on the one hand, the colonisation of cultural and social environments by material and technological devices, and the resulting transformations of work, human relationships, love or playing (Malinowska 2009). On another hand, as pointed out by Sadie Plant (1997), technoculture can also be a tool of empowerment for specific social categories, especially those under oppression, providing resources for new aptitudes converted into competences and enabling mobility in social positions.…”