Romantic networks

Review of "Frozen Intimacies. Emotions in capitalism" by Eva Illouz (3/3).

Romantic networks begins by conjecturing, through the example of the film You've Got an E-mail (1998), that cyber romances, by shedding "the constraints of bodily interactions (...), would allow for a fuller expression of the authentic self."

But if it were the case that the Internet were to annul the body, one might wonder what possibility there is of experiencing through technology emotions (romantic or otherwise) that are inseparable from the body. This question is the subject of the third of the lectures that make up Intimidades congeladas.

Romantic networks and dating websites

Given the constant increase in the number of users of dating websites, we understand how economically profitable these paid online contents are. But how do they operate on these websites?

Dating sites ask users to create a profile through a questionnaire that is intended to reveal one's personality in order to facilitate compatibilities. "Thus, for the purposes of meeting a virtual other, the self is required to go through a vast process of reflective self-observation, introspection, self-classification, and articulation of tastes and opinions." Thus, participation in interpersonal compatibility sites involves at least three psychological presuppositions:

In turn, the consequences that derive from the transit through the cybernetic devices of emotional compatibility are:

Cybernetic disembodiment

The author argues that the body, absent in the rational logic of cybernetic relationships, is the greatest repository of sexual attraction that a person possesses, since the tone of voice or gestures will transmit an attraction that is incapable of being recognized by means of the rational procedures that operate through the web in the exchange of disembodied textual information.

On the other hand, by incompletely expressing the reality of the loved one, the body allows the idealization of the loved one to unfold unconsciously around it.The body allows the idealization of the loved one to unfold unconsciously around it.. So we can hardly love in the absence of an existential context that involves us with the loved one.

This is why the Internet increases the gap between expectations and experience, since romantic love is mobilized when the person who loves, not having all the information about the loved one, but mainly the information offered by his or her body ("contextual and practical knowledge"), idealizes the latter through the imagination.

On the contrary, since the dating websites have a file of the characteristics of the users, there is no longer that which is absent, which the imagination is romantically in charge of making present.

The uniformising management of abundance

Likewise, the decorporeization demanded by the Internet is compensated by means of, on the one hand, a frozen image through the photographic medium that shows our beauty "in a competitive market of similar photographs", and, on the other hand, a series of linguistic conventions that facilitate mediation between people who interact cybernetically.

With regard to this second point, it should be said that, due to the large number of diverse contacts, the interaction is conveyed by means of the Internet, interaction is conveyed through standardized rituals (introductions, questions, jokes, jokes, jokes, jokes, jokes, jokes, jokes, jokes). (introductions, questions, jokes, topics of conversation, etc.) and reproduced "over and over again in the course of their encounters via the Internet".

This is how the linguistic elements that mediate between contacts are standardized in a limited repertoire. Thus it is that the self-representation of singularity that allows the creation of a profile tailored to oneself, paradoxically, is suspended by the uniformity that requires the use of attributes that, on the one hand, are conventionally considered positive, and which, on the other hand, facilitate the management of numerous different interactions.

The economizing management of abundance

Dating websites use psychological categories to maximize and sophisticate within the logic of consumerism the encounters between users, despite the fact that romanticism vanishes in the calculation, and everything that is unexpected and ineffable about love becomes the product of a rational choice as a consequence of an accumulated knowledge about the attributes of the other.

It is in this sense that Illouz states that "the spirit that presides over the Internet is that of the economy of abundance, in which the self must choose and maximize its options and is forced to use cost-benefit and efficiency techniques". Consequently, interaction loses its surprising aura and, with it, its charm and magic. This is how "the internet literally structures matchmaking as a market or (...) as an economic transaction: it transforms the self into a packaged product that competes with others in an open market regulated by the law of supply and demand".

It seems as if the rationality operating in the psychological technologies of emotions divides the self between a public sphere in which representations of the self are commodified and a private sphere imprisoned by fantasies subjected to the requirements of a market without body heat.

Illouz, Eva. (2007). Frozen Intimacies. Emotions in capitalism. Katz Editores (p.161-237).

• The conversion of the private self into a public representation.
• The textualization of subjectivity by externalizing and objectifying the self by means of representation and language supports. by means of representation and language supports.
• Knowledge of oneself as precedes an awareness of the other.
• The knowledge of the personality of the other precedes the physical attraction that one has about him/her.
• The encounter between people is made on the basis of the liberal paradigm of "choice".
• Each person is in competition with others in the open market of the dating web.
Bibliographical references: