 | e-mail trouble: love and addiction @ the matrix Subjects: Electronic mail messages -- Psychological aspects; Baty S. Paige 1961– -- Correspondence; Internet addiction; Human-computer interaction; Love -- Computer network resources; Friendship -- Computer network resources; "This is about a society of isolates who all communicate with one another from terminal sites. This is about being disembodied, distanced, distinct, and that sort of boundary-thing. It is not about being present. It is not about being there. It is not about a shared history, or a shared meal, or a shared story, or any kind of mutuality. It is about contact between virtual strangers. . . . It happens when you feel that you are so alone that you need anybody to talk to--anybody at all--because you believe that your connections have failed you. This kind of connection leaves you cold and dead inside, because it lacks history and a language of belonging." In this daring, postmodern autobiography, S. Paige Baty recounts her search for love and community on the Internet. Taking Jack Kerouac's On the Road as a point of departure, Baty describes both an actual road trip to meet the object of an e-mail romance and the cyber-search for connection that draws so many people into the matrix of the Internet. Writing in a bold, experimental style that freely mixes e-mails, poems, fragments of quotations, and puns into expository text, she convincingly links e-mail trouble with "female trouble" in the displacement of embodied love and accountable human relationships to opaque screens and alienated identities. Her book stands as a vivid feminist critique of our culture's love affair with technology and its dehumanizing effect on personal relationships. The late S. Paige Baty was also the author of American Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic. |
