An account of the complex relationship between technology and
romanticism that links nineteenth-century monsters, automata, and
mesmerism with twenty-first-century technology's magic devices and
romantic cyborgs. Romanticism and technology are widely assumed to
be opposed to each other. Romanticism-understood as a reaction
against rationalism and objectivity-is perhaps the last thing users
and developers of information and communication technology (ICT)
think about when they engage with computer programs and electronic
devices. And yet, as Mark Coeckelbergh argues in this book, this
way of thinking about technology is itself shaped by romanticism
and obscures a better and deeper understanding of our relationship
to technology. Coeckelbergh describes the complex relationship
between technology and romanticism that links nineteenth-century
monsters, automata, and mesmerism with twenty-first-century
technology's magic devices and romantic cyborgs. Coeckelbergh
argues that current uses of ICT can be interpreted as attempting a
marriage of Enlightenment rationalism and romanticism. He describes
the "romantic dialectic," when this new kind of material
romanticism, particularly in the form of the cyborg as romantic
figure, seems to turn into its opposite. He shows that both
material romanticism and the objections to it are still part of
modern thinking, and part of the romantic dialectic. Reflecting on
what he calls "the end of the machine," Coeckelbergh argues that to
achieve a more profound critique of contemporary technologies and
culture, we need to explore not only different ways of thinking but
also different technologies-and that to accomplish the former we
require the latter.
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