In the most authoritative survey of computer-mediated love, Aaron Ben- Ze’ev (2004) describes the rise of romantic relationships that are conducted entirely online or in cyberspace. Though an increasing number of such relationships are being formed, Ben- Ze’ev notes that “online relationships cannot overcome the desire for physical closeness” (p. 54). Even despite initial intentions, love almost always transfers to the actual world, such that “the successful goal of an online romantic relationship is its termination” (p. 142). Like Pygmalion’s statue, the lovers emerge out of the medium and into the flesh.  

            Why is cyberspace largely unable to sustain love? This paper proposes one possible answer to this central question drawing from work in the philosophy of technology and the philosophy of love. Explaining what is inadequate about online love refines our understanding of human intimacy in a world in which personal relationships are increasingly mediated by information technologies. It will also help shed insight into the future of love as technologies continue to improve the means available for distance relationships.  

            Following a brief historical account of mediated love, the paper argues that the central question does not have an obvious answer. Indeed, cyber-love is ideally suited to current social dynamics and cultural values. Important societal conditioning factors explaining the growth in online love include increasing fragmentation, career-orientation, and mobility. Important cultural values include strong emphases on individual freedom, independence, imagination, and self-expression. A look at the psychological and sociological research on online romance demonstrates how the anonymity and “narrow bandwidth” of computer-mediated love foster these values through a reciprocal process of idealization (e.g., Walther 1996). Accordingly, it is, as Ben-Ze’ev notes, puzzling why people almost always “risk destroying” such “pure relationships” by transferring them to the actual world.

            In order to explain the shortcomings of online love, the paper takes a deeper look at the Western tradition of thought about eros. This serves three purposes. First, it explains romantic love as an “immanent transcendence,” in which the relationship itself serves as the source of ideals, rather than an external goal such as the Good or God. Second, drawing from Harry Frankfurt (2004), the question of “why do we love?” is answered in terms of meaning, or an orientation toward another person as an end in him or herself. Third, this account of love explains how the “other” in a relationship must have a certain “weightiness” in order for loving relationships to be meaningful.

             The next section argues that computer-mediation is a non-neutral technique that filters out this essential weight of the other. Research in the philosophy of technology demonstrates that the Internet, like any technology, is not a neutral tool. Rather, it forms a certain context of communication that shapes the nature of social relationships. This was most precisely captured in Marshall McLuhan’s notion that “the medium is the message” (e.g., 1967). Another way to phrase the matter is that “context affects content.”

            This section then fleshes out the concept of “weight” in terms of three defining qualities of love. First, the “thrill of the other,” which speaks to the importance of affection, touch, and embodied togetherness, is largely absent in online love. This speaks not only to the more obvious shortcomings in terms of sex, which all but the most futuristic of haptic technologies could even begin to simulate. Also at issue here is what could be called, following Cocking and Matthews (2000), many subtle acts of “noticing” who the other really is that require physical co-presence. The increased control and choice afforded by computer-mediation actually distort and omit the nature of the relational self that is created in erotic relationships. This requires spontaneous, unscripted interaction.

            Second, the “continuity of the other,” which speaks to the importance of shared experiences, is absent in online love. Cyberspace is dependent on the actual world in the sense that people must “log off” to go about the daily business of life. This means that cyberlove is inherently discontinuous in a way it is not in the actual world. Online love may be initially attractive, because, as Virginia Blum notes, such relationships are free “from the kinds of ongoing nitpicky quotidian battles over who takes the children to school, cooks the meals, picks up the dry cleaning... They are relationships emptied of pesky extrarelational factors that impinge on ‘pure’ emotional satiety” (p. 344). Yet, many theorists of love explain how these factors are not “extrarelational” at all. Rather, because love involves a shared history, it cannot be isolated from other aspects of being-with-another. Love is not a moment of time, a state that can come and go, but it is “identified by a characteristic narrative history” (Rorty 1993, p. 75).

            Third, the “commanding presence of the other,” which speaks to commitment and limitations of the will, is heavily eroded in online love. Indeed, this aspect of love is even missing if we correct for the preceding two failures by creating “tailor-able” androids (continuously programmable to suit our wishes) through the convergence of information- and bio-technologies. This ultimate act of computerized love demonstrates its deepest failings. But in so doing, it sheds an interesting new light on the meaning of human love, which Martha Nussbaum (1990) describes as a “source of dangerous openness” that requires a “deliberate yielding to uncontrollable external influences” (p. 281). Or in the words of Emmanuel Levinas (1969), love cannot be significant and orienting if it is no more than a “simple presence of self to self.”

            Indeed, the insights of Levinas demonstrate that, despite what may be commonly assumed, it is not the absence of physical touch that accounts for the greatest shortcoming of online love. Rather, it is the fact that (for the reasons discussed above) the other as a being outside of one’s control is missing. “The relation with the Other alone introduces a dimension of transcendence, and leads us to a relation totally different from experience in the sensible sense of the term, relative and egoist” (p. 193). The greatest inadequacies of online love are not sensual (aesthetic), but rather ethical or ontological. The shift away from online love speaks to the “inevitable orientation of being” “starting from oneself toward the Other.” In the end, love requires “the real other, here with me” in a way that cannot be technologically mediated or simulated.   

Sources:

Ben- Ze’ev, Aaron. (2004). Love Online: Emotions on the Internet. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Cocking, Dean, and Steve Matthews. (2000). “Unreal Friends,” Ethics and Information Technology, vol. 2, pp. 223-231.

Frankfurt, Harry. (2004). The Reasons of Love. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Levinas, Emmanuel. (1969). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Alphonso Lingis, trans. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. (1967). The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam Books.

Nussbaum, Martha. (1990). Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rorty, A.O. (1993). “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is not Love which Alters not when it Alteration Finds,” in Badhwar, Neera, ed. Friendship: A Philosophical Reader. [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press], pp. 73-88.

Walther, J.B. (1996). “Computer-mediated Communication: Impersonal, Interpersonal, and Hyperpersonal Interaction,” Communication Research , vol. 23, pp. 3–43.