Love Online: Emotions on the internet
The Interactive Revolution in Imagination
We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love - Tom Robbins
When asked why people engage with sexual relationships online the most common reason given was that they have specific fantasies and desires that are not being fourfold in their offline relationships.
Online relationships involve many imaginative aspects. Cyberspace is part of reality therefore incorrect to regard it as the direct opposite of real space. Cyberspace can be understood as a space where real people have actual intentions with other real people- while being able to create their own and other peoples personalities.
A man who often participates in cybersex writes:
“I love to cyber, I think it’s great. The only thing is I can’t cyber with someone I have never talked to before. Someone sent me a message and went right into cybering without asking my name or even if I wanted to. I would just like to have a regular conversation first. I guess some reality does play a part here, because I would not have sex in real life with someone whose name I did not know”
The decline of aura in art happens when a once profound,unique object becomes a commodity of sorts.
If a highly regarded painting such as Van Gogh’s Starry Night can be reproduced by the thousands it could be argued that the aura of the original painting begins to diminish. The increasing demand from the masses to be included in a culture and process they were once excluded from beings to break down through the reproducibility of art. As a result we are no longer bound to our own cognitive perception breaking down preexisting social hierarchies within society, first established through elitist high culture and in this way photography revolutionises art.
Historically Pop Art also worked to break down the notion of “high art” and “low art” by using typical, everyday objects and placing them in the context of high art, as a result opening up the medium to the masses.
Andy Warhol is an obvious forefront to the Pop art movement. Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans were driven by the fact that it was what Warhol claimed to be his daily habit of eating a bowl of Campbell’s soup and a sandwich for lunch spurred on by this he began to produce multiple, portrait style paintings of the products different flavours in early 1961. (The Regents of The University of California and Athens, E. 2009) In essentially making reproductions of the Campbell Soup advertisement Warhol changes the context in which mass culture is viewed.
