Adam Briggle

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework to aid in understanding and evaluating love online. The framework maps the territory of online love by identifying important issues and providing a mechanism for combining relevant theoretical perspectives.Design/methodology/approachInterdisciplinary literature is reviewed and related through normative and descriptive conceptual analysis.FindingsA diverse and complex set of practices, technologies, intentions, and behaviors comprise love online. Theoretical works on love and mediation can be combined to improve conceptual clarity.Practical implicationsThe framework provides a simple but powerful tool for making sense of and critiquing the existing literature as well as outlining avenues for future research.Originality/valueThe framework puts diverse strands of scholarly work into an interdisciplinary discussion about an important phenomenon in new media societies.

Natural science and economics are regularly used as means for adjudicating environmental controversies. But can these become stalking-horses for other concerns? Might some environmental controversies be aesthetic in nature and likely to resist resolution unless and until we acknowledge this? This paper uses the case study of a proposed wind farm to examine the relationships between the humanities, sciences, and stakeholders in environmental decision making. After providing background on wind power and the proposed Nantucket Sound wind farm, it addresses four questions: What does “aesthetics” mean? Howwere aesthetic concerns expressed in the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), and what were the shortcomings of the EIS process? How could it be improved? This last question raises issues about how to rationally adjudicate matters of aesthetics in environmental policy making. The paper concludes with some thoughts on why this is such an important (and thorny) issue and what role humanists should play in environmental disputes.

Dean Cocking and Steve Matthews’ article “Unreal Friends” argues that the formation of purely mediated friendships via the Internet is impossible. I critique their argument and contend that mediated contexts, including the Internet, can actually promote exceptionally strong friendships according to the very conceptual criteria utilized by Cocking and Matthews. I first argue that offline relationships can be constrictive and insincere, distorting important indicators and dynamics in the formation of close friends. The distance of mediated friendships mitigates this problem by promoting the courage to be candid. Next, I argue that the offline world of largely oral exchanges is often too shallow and hasty to promote deep bonds. The deliberateness of written correspondence acts as a weight to submerge friendships to greater depths and as a brake to enhance attentiveness to and precision about one’s own and one’s friend’s character. Nonetheless, close friendships may fail to develop on the Internet. Insofar as this failure occurs, however, it would be for reasons other than those identified by Cocking and Matthews.

Are citizens of contemporary technological society authors of their own lives? With Alasdair MacIntyre, Bruno Latour and Albert Borgmann, we discuss the shortcomings of traditional liberalism in terms of its ability to answer this question. MacIntyre argues that biological vulnerabilities and social interdependencies establish meaningful parameters within which reason and willing emerge. But MacIntyre ignores technologies as a third parameter. Latour defines humans as nodes in a socio-technical network, in which technologies are actors on par with humans. However, Latour adopts a purely external perspective, ignoring human intentions, desires, and reasons. Borgmann argues that although freedom of choice is severely restricted, sometimes one can still resist the rule of technology. But Borgmann denies the pluralism of modern societies. Although all three schools have their shortcomings, combined, they provide us with a valuable palette of insights on human agency in a technological culture.

This essay argues that political, economic, and cultural developments have made the twentieth century disciplinary approach to philosophy unsustainable. It (a) discusses the reasons behind this unsustainability, which also affect the academy at large, (b) describes applied philosophy as an inadequate theoretical reaction to contemporary societal pressures, and (c) proposes a dedisciplined and interstitial approach??field philosophy??as a better response to the challenges facing the twenty-first century philosophy