Born out of a wedlock, her name was to be besmirched
Daughter of Zeus, she was the epitome of beauty on heaven and on earth.
His name was Paris, King Priam and queen Hecuba’s forsaken child, and,
Theirs was a story of love so pure, or was it a lust so vile?
History narrates this master-ploy
Of valiance, deceit and a city destroyed.
A dream that foretold the destiny of this boy
It was the saga of Helen of Troy.
From the time when Eve took a bite of the forbidden fruit to the time when the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle walked down the aisle, historical accounts of love and intimacy have come in all forms and splendour.From Homers’ remarkable account of the battle of Trojan partly fought over Helen of Troy to the evergreen Shakespearean sonnets, the language of love has literally transcended many borders and possible imaginations. But the ambiguity surrounding the definition and expression of love and intimacy has remained consistent throughout the ages.
To put a cap on a particular definition of love would be skillfully erudite, but highly erroneous at the same time.
As the philosopher Spinoza remarked,” an act of love is an ontological event that ruptures existing being and creates new being”. Since the creation of new being coincide with different concepts throughout history, each period brings a new way of being and living. Thus, each period in history offers a prevailing concept of love and the modern age offers no exceptions.
The 20th century heralded a period of radical social transformations that were characteristic of the ‘sexual revolution’ of the age. An ever increasing emphasis on equality and self-discovery was compounded by technological developments in contraception that quintessentially freed sex from its intrinsic relationship to reproduction. Consequently the conventional notions of love, intimacy and sex came under intense scrutiny.Scholarly interjections exemplified how ‘pure relationship’, I.e. an ideal type where a relationship is based on sexual and emotional equality and continues only for as long as both parties derive mutual satisfaction’, emerged as the hallmarks of the modern age, with an increased emphasis on ‘plastic sexuality’ that necessitated greater sexual freedom and choice. Furthermore, the digital age brought a paradigmatic change in the meaning of intimate relations and their expression. The subsequent advancements, in Internet-based communication and social networking applications over the past decades have led to a major shift in the mode of human social engagement.
For a section of the society unwelcoming of this change, the transition represented the rise of the twin forces of individualisation and social change that ‘liquefied’ the solidity and security once provided by romantic partnerships and family structures. However, for the people of the digital age, this shift provided new opportunities to experience and actualize intimacy, both in the context of preexisting relationships and interactions with strangers. In the age of internet and mobile applications,the advent of certain types of online platforms, like online dating websites (e.g., eHarmony, PlentyOfFish) and mobile applications (e.g., Tinder) encouraged social contact between strangers for further establishing intimate interactions and relationships offline. Scholars like Bauman (2003) specifically identify ‘computer-dating’ as symptomatic of ‘liquid love’, arguing that it has transformed romance and courtship into a type of entertainment where users can date ‘secure in the knowledge they can always return to the marketplace for another bout of shopping’.
To put it simply dating platforms have improved the chance for singles to find a better partner, and the subsequent development of Web 2.0 functionalities have revolutionised communication and the language of intimacy. By preserving anonymity these online platforms endow the individual with much more freedom when it comes to the disclosure of personal information, opinions, and feelings than in face-to-face interactions. Consequently, virtual interactions enable individuals to overcome certain “gating features” like age, gender, race, physical appearance disability, or any form of real or perceived stigma,that may otherwise deter them from having meaningful connections.
These features and their attached variables were contextualised as products of a newly emerging cultural construct with the interesting features. Firstly, using the online platform just until someone finds their soulmate undermines its commercial success. While the popularity of the dating sites still relies on the dream to meet the ideal partner the platform’s anonymous algorithms are designed to make subscribers keep using the platform, to share with and attract new users. The FOMO mechanism emerges (FOMO representing “Fear Of Missing Out”), and it is a spiral without an end.
A second factor quintessentially deals with the consumer culture and marketing that is open to the emerging experience economy. ‘Experience economy means consuming in an entirely different way, wherein every commodity or service (thanks to these new communication technologies) is perceived as an occasion for a memorable experience. The new order of the day is constantly offering new experiences'(Kristian Bankov,2019,Pp-9). The boom in the choice of gourmet burger experiences, increase in touristic possibilities ,infinite numbers of immersive video game and VR experiences, extreme sports, reality shows, sports and movie stars digital fandom are all testaments to this cultural shift. This deep cultural shift has resulted in an overwhelming presence of erotica and pornography on the internet for anyone at any point in time. As a new way of expressing and actualising individual sexualality, online pornography has been a host to a multitude of psycho-social desires and the consumers of this digital matter have not been bereft of its effects.
Consumption of online pornography not only hampers with an individual’s libidinal sublimation but according to recent scholarship, is also usurping the fundamental parental function in regards to sexuality and is creating dangerous gaps in the early education system. This is however, not the complete story. Perhaps the most striking is the pornography industry’s cultural impact, which also exposes deep ethical and feminist issues. Digitally available pornography affects an entire sector of the creative industries and inspires many important design innovations. Last but not least, pornography represents an important influence on adult sexuality and sexual practices.
The digital market for pornography provides the desired stimuli for innovations in the creative and designing industry, and, last but not the least pornography exerts an important influence on adult sexuality and sexual practices. The Indian scenario reflects a substantial dearth of research related to pornography and its effects. Legally there is no provision in India that prohibits viewing pornography. Section 67 of the Information Technology Act only deals with “publishing obscene information in electronic form”. This measure has been appropriated to criminalise the posting of pornographic content online. However, the act of privately accessing such content – say in one’s home – is not illegal. This is evident from the data presented by one of the world’s biggest porn sites in which India ranks in fifth place for the most daily visitors to the website. The website saw a total of 78.9 billion video views globally in 2014.
Following this, there was a shift in the government’s stance toward availability of online pornography. An order was issued by the government to ban 857 sites with pornographic content, in July 2015 which was later revoked the same year. In November 2018 the government ordered telecom companies and Internet service providers (ISPs) to ban 827 adult sites from their networks. This directive was the result of an order from the Uttarakhand High Court, which found 857 sites to contain adult content—similar to an order issued back in 2015. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology upon Inspection found that 30 of them did not host any pornographic content, and so the list was cut down accordingly.
Furthermore, the governments attempt at blocking some 857 sites from a cesspool of over a million sites and it’s selective criticism of child pornography on the grounds of “moral degeneracy” reflects a lack of clarity and as some scholars have remarked,’a viscous game of moral appeasement’. One needs to ask whether this approach of intellectualising something that is primal in humans is correct. Internet technologies facilitate online intimacy and the multimodal characteristics of the new media only reflects future possibilities. From unimodal asynchronous interfaces (e.g., email, text messaging) to synchronous multimodal (e.g., video chat or fully immersive settings such as virtual environments), the digital age only expands the scope of interpersonal communications, though one must be wary of the risks that accompany it, like the blurring distinction between private and public space, the emergence of cyber-harassment, cyber-bullying and cyber-stalking among adolescents to name a few.
Networking of intimacy then essentially has to do with flirting, courtship and the ongoing search for love and fulfilment via the internet. It bears new opportunities, freedom and ways of experiencing pleasure while reviving old anxieties about risk, self-image and love.
And while the age of digital love may not witness the story of a ‘face launching a thousand ships’, it will surely revolutionise the scope of realizing and expressing ‘love’ that propelled those thousand ships.
