𝗪𝗥𝗜𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗚
ks
Love Online
Musings of Love, Online: An essay published by SPAM Zine and Press
> We are all looking for a connection. Be that an internet one or an IRL one, whatever the connection is, we want it. This feeling has become immediate. It is obsessive and sometimes narcissistic. We have to have it now, and we can – because of the internet. Gone are the times of wondering whether someone fancies you or not, now a simple swipe tells us. We can stay online and up to date with hot spots and airdrops. We can stay in love with dating and porn sites.
> Whilst perambulating online I stumbled across the word l i m e r e n c e, coined in the 70s by Dorothy Tennov, a psychologist studying the experiences of being in love. Tennov created this new word to describe her findings of the emotional feeling her participants had when they felt an infatuation with someone that was often unrequited and/or obsessive. They couldn’t commit to a simple task without thinking of their LO (limerent object) aka loved one. Something as normal as reading, Tennov noted, would become a thought bridge back to their limerent lover. These intrusive thoughts that Tennov described seem to be more apparent today, with the Instagram attention spans of millennials and addictive apps that allow you to obsess over complete strangers.
> Anna Biller’s 2016 film The Love Witch main character Elaine has many a love affair, desperately trying to find a man. She becomes completely obsessed with her LO’s (limerent objects), one being her friend’s husband. The film focuses on her infatuation with them and how she casts spells on them that make them her hapless dim victims. She is seen to quickly cast them aside when she realises they just aren’t good enough, before moving onto the next. Elaine retorts, ‘What I’m really interested in is love. You might say I’m addicted to love.’ The protagonist is obsessed with love itself, rather than the person she falls for.
> In Real Life Magazine Alexandra Molotkow argues that limerence is a narcissistic act in her essay Crush Fatigue, ‘the great irony, of course, is that in chasing the idea of someone else, it can only wrap yourself up in you.’ Love online could be just another way digital natives are obsessing over themselves. An ultimately selfish act. Or maybe it’s with the internet that we are becoming disassociated with love, enjoying fantasy escapism as we compare ourselves to people we’ve never met…
> Love is ubiquitous and if we peel it back to what it actually is: pure human emotion, it can’t ever be a waste of time or seen negatively. It is almost as if the internet has teamed up with society’s current turmoil to give love a bad name. Love is considered for losers, much like the ‘live laugh love’ signs that we see on forgotten bedroom walls. No one wants to admit when they love something and no one wants to be caught with one of those tacky wall decorations. Maybe we have finally reached a level of such melancholy and nihilism that living and laughing and loving is considered totally lame. Anna Biller tweeted, ‘We’re living in a culture now where love and sex are equally shameful concepts.’ People are ashamed of being in love or showing love, just like it isn’t considered cool to stalk your ex, no one wants to be the first to say the ‘L’ word.
> It could be that people’s perceptions of love have changed due to the different corners of the internet that allow you to encounter moments that would otherwise be an intimate affair between two or more human bodies. More people are buying sex toys (Amazon stocks 10,000 various types) than actually having sex. More people are hooking up via their phones but fewer people are having sex and c o n n e c t i n g on a personal level.
> In the article Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex by Kate Julian for The Atlantic, the sex recession is raised and the internet is blamed. Julian argues that even though we are in the age of acceptance and sex before marriage is considered very normal, even ‘Anal sex has gone from final taboo to ‘fifth base’—Teen Vogue (yes, Teen Vogue) even ran a guide to it.’ Yet we are having much less than generations before. She goes on to say, ‘Further outside the mainstream, the far-right Proud Boys group has a ‘no wanks’ policy, which prohibits masturbating more than once a month.’ The alt-right group’s founder, Gavin McInnes, who also co-founded Vice Media, has said that porn and masturbation are making people ‘not even want to pursue relationships.’ Albeit a rogue choice of comparison, there are corners online where the Proud Boys rule supreme, behind greasy laptop screens.
> Porn and masturbation are addictive, just like how Elaine from The Love Witch is addicted to love, people can be addicted to online behaviours that come with watching porn and masturbating. Today it is far easier to watch porn and jerk off than it is to go out and chat with someone and sleep with them.
> In Geraldine Snell’s book overlove (2018), the reader is taken on a journey of obsession and complete fantasy, with the crux of it being limerence. This lover fabricates writing to someone she has never even met, imagining their relationship unfolding through unsent Facebook messages and undelivered texts. It is an addictive read, much like love itself is addictive, and being online itself is addictive; the marriage goes on and on. Snell perfectly captures the all-encompassing feeling of love that is inherently ~female~. It draws my easily distracted attention back to The Love Witch and Elaine’s fantasies and then the fantasies that we are able to make reality due to the World Wide Web.
> Love is holistic, it is a feeling felt by everyone at some stage. We are in a world where we are taught to value commodity culture over nature and emotion. Love online is predominantly as obsessive and addictive as the webspace allows it to be. What seems to be missing online is a type of love that translates to tenderness and romanticism. The internet has made sharing easier than ever, so why not share kindness and build foundations of sentimental sincerity rather than a narcissistic, individualist state of mind? As love, as primitive as it is, might be the most (dare I say the word) a u t h e n t i c thing we have left.
Psychogeography Online
An article published by Screen Shot Magazine
Wake up snooze the alarm > check Twitter > check Instagram > Advertisement: SALES (check until you remember your bank balance then go back to Instagram) > check Facebook > check News Source > Advertisement: Clear Blue 99% accurate (I shouldn't have Googled early signs of pregnancy last night, do the algorithms think I am pregnant?) > repeat in the exact same order the next morning.
To wander: characterised by aimless, slow, or pointless movement: such as
a: that winds or meanders
b: wandering course
c: not keeping a rational or sensible course
Wandering without a purpose, taking in your environment, without thought of your destination. Asking yourself how a place or building makes you feel, and behave. There is a consumer refusal with psychogeography. The term was coined in 1950s Paris by Guy Debord, who sought to go against the Society of the Spectacle at the time. Or in other terms, to stop consuming, to remove himself from the commodified public space and take in his surroundings in a more earnest way, connecting himself, and his newly founded Situationist movement, to cultural (rather than capitalist) production.
‘Dérive’, or drift, was defined as the “technique of locomotion without a goal,” in which “one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” Wrote Situationist Sadie Plant. This refrain from the psychogeographer's usual movements and motives is what they are still seeking and enjoying today.
a: that winds or meanders
b: wandering course
c: not keeping a rational or sensible course
Wandering without a purpose, taking in your environment, without thought of your destination. Asking yourself how a place or building makes you feel, and behave. There is a consumer refusal with psychogeography. The term was coined in 1950s Paris by Guy Debord, who sought to go against the Society of the Spectacle at the time. Or in other terms, to stop consuming, to remove himself from the commodified public space and take in his surroundings in a more earnest way, connecting himself, and his newly founded Situationist movement, to cultural (rather than capitalist) production.
‘Dérive’, or drift, was defined as the “technique of locomotion without a goal,” in which “one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” Wrote Situationist Sadie Plant. This refrain from the psychogeographer's usual movements and motives is what they are still seeking and enjoying today.
Wake up snooze the alarm > check Twitter > check Instagram > Advertisement: SALES (check until you remember your bank balance then go back to Instagram) > check Facebook > check News Source > Advertisement: London Wellness Centre (I shouldn't have Googled back pain last night, do the algorithms think I need a chiropractor?) repeat in the exact same order the next morning.
Capitalism is a closed world; each day we take the same paths and routes to work, stop at the same coffee shop and buy the same things from the same Prets for lunch (Advertisement: Your nearest McDonald’s is only 6 meters away). Being online is no different, as corporatisation has taken hold; the internet has become more and more like the cities and towns we inhabit. Individuals become one of a million passers-by in a constant state of liminality, taking the same routes and always ready to spend.
Reading ‘Where to for Public Space’ by Constant Dullaart, he says that faux public spaces IRL, such as City Mile, match URL faux public spaces. The World Wide Web is a collection of privately maintained environments linked together, hence the reason for legislation on the Internet and the flow of profitable information through these websites.
My mind is taken to the death of Vine (RIP VINE), a truly free space online, to drift, to derive, away from corporatisation, a space to wander and wonder, without thought, away from advertisements and consumer culture, a place where user-generated content was freely accessible. Except, this was exactly the reason for its demise. It was unprofitable, and therefore not warranted online.
My mind is taken to the death of Vine (RIP VINE), a truly free space online, to drift, to derive, away from corporatisation, a space to wander and wonder, without thought, away from advertisements and consumer culture, a place where user-generated content was freely accessible. Except, this was exactly the reason for its demise. It was unprofitable, and therefore not warranted online.
Wake up snooze the alarm > check Twitter > check Instagram > Advertisement: SALES (check until you remember your bank balance then go back to Instagram) > check Facebook > check News Source > Advertisement: Personality quiz: Anxious or ADHD? (I shouldn’t have Googled dying from a hangover last night, do the algorithms think I am a hypochondriac?) > repeat in the exact same order the next morning.
Psychogeography was intended to cultivate an awareness of the ways in which everyday life is presently conditioned and controlled, the ways in which this manipulation can be exposed, subverted and resisted, and the possibilities for chosen forms of constructed situations in the post-spectacular world. The point of psychogeography for the Situationists was to gain a perspective of their environments, to be aware yet chose to go against them. It isn’t the case of having cities and places stop still, to not develop or change, but to be aware of these changes and use them in their wanderings.
What is more ‘everyday’ than the internet? This too can be exposed, subverted and resisted in order to wander off the digital path, away from corporate surveillance sites aimed to sell to you algorithmically. (Sponsored: Chipotle Mexican Grill, avoiding gluten? Going vegan?) It isn’t the case to wish for idealistic and naive 90s cyberspace but to be aware of the surveillanced space and use it to your advantage.
Such disorientation was craved by the Situationists. It was a means of showing the concealed potential of experimentation, the pleasure and play in everyday life. They considered chaos to be a valuable means to exposing the way in which the experiences made possible by capitalist production could be appropriated within a new enabling system of social relations.
Psychogeographers saw the city as a place of unification and empowerment, where they would go off the structured path. They used detournement to turn attention to the ruptures of society. For the Situationists, this was seen in poverty-stricken Paris, despite plentiful material goods. We can see this happening online today, despite the turmoil we feel politically. People take an image: reshare it, repost it, hashtag it, like it, tweet it, and its original meaning has gone; it's been reappropriated into a new community. It’s been taken from its algorithmic path on an unpredictable journey, usually stemming from web forums such as Reddit, Imgur and 4Chan. These sites are key leaders in this detournement, albeit they’re often hate-fueled and transgressive. However, the support networks on these forums (although equally argued as internet troll clubs) is paramount. They are truly public spaces, to drift as you so wish.
Wake up snooze the alarm > check Twitter > check Instagram > Advertisement: SALE (check until you remember your bank balance then go back to Instagram) > check Facebook > check News Source > Advertisement: Huel, try it now from just £1.33 a meal (I shouldn’t have Googled workout videos last night, do the algorithms think I would drink that?) > repeat in the exact same order the next morning..