Love and Other Devices

Love and Other Devices

To what extent should we medicate a lack of love?

Is a chemical attraction better than a digital distraction?

Or should we just be left to our own devices?

Google Trends report a surge in searches for ‘mobile phone addiction’, closely followed by ‘social media addiction’. Mine is on my lap. It’s not off. It’s never off. Because this is Normal? 2018, and we are living in an always-on culture. The conversation is ‘Love and Other Devices’. We are here to talk about love, and how the rise of mobile phone addiction might be the death of romance.

Love is critical to our survival. Babies are literally helpless without it. Without attachment, they die. They need us to be responsive to their cries, attending to their needs. Love carries us through life. Arguably, it is all we seek.

Yet in our relationships, we are choosing to be elsewhere. Sat with our phones never more than a reach away, we scroll through a never-ending sea of content. Like Pavlov’s dogs, we respond to each ring, ping and notification with a panting, slavering hunger. Leaving our partners starving for our attention. Our screens are the new seductress. What is left of love, if we are so easily drawn away into our mobile phones? And should we be chemically resuscitated to our desire once we have lost our passion?

I admit, the discussion wasn’t quite what I was expecting. Anticipating a chat about addiction to scrolling, the conversation swiftly segued into love and medication of love. It’s a difficult conversation. I confess to not knowing the voices of everyone who has a stake in it. Medicating those with depression, children with ADHD, prescribing pills, can sometimes problematise more than it solves. But it did beg the question. Should we ever be ‘prescribing’ love? Or, more fascinatingly, suppressing love?

A relationship expert, an addiction expert and a man with a PhD in Love walk into a bar…  

The conversation drifts from phone addiction, towards the ‘answer’ of medication. Why is medication the solution? Why should we not be left to our own devices? Have gone so far over the line that we no longer discuss the cause of the addiction, but head straight for medication?

The research is exciting. That we can track the brain's signals and chemicals and reproduce them as a cure, is a positive advance in science. I think. But.

What is love?

Baby don't hurt me

Don't hurt me

No more

- Bex Bell

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Love and Other Drugs - Philosophy Now

America's Love Affair with Prescription Medication - Consumer Reports 

Chemical Attraction - Observer

Phone Addiction is Real - Forbes

F*CKING MEN // King's Head Theatre

Ten interlocking scenes present separate sets of lovers, each semi-ironically riffing on different ‘aspects’ of love. The platonic ideal. ‘Simple’ carnal lust. Tortured archetypes (‘Actor’ and ‘Journalist’) playing out and struggling with their desires, counter-desires and the simple physical fact of their bodies. 

F*cking Men is a reflection on what it means to live out what could queasily be termed the ‘gay male experience’ surrounding sexuality and perception, commitment and relationships. The title is something of a red herring. Whatever nudity there is remains secondary to the ideas surrounding the aforementioned themes. The bodies are used as props, showing the way that the relationships depicted subtly morph and modulate under external and internal pressures and strains.

The way that sex and body can be subtly weaponised is also deftly explored. It’s a messy, fraught exploration that deals with the ugly, implicit guilt and repression in denied sexuality.  The one scene without any sex (the meeting between ‘Journalist’ and ‘Actor’) is a meeting point between paranoia, fear and self-loathing, all focused on the body and messy sexual desire. Yet resolution isn’t found in the act of sex, either. As each scene shows, it is the sheer multiplicity of desire that makes it such a complex field of enquiry. Whether it is denied or temporarily fulfilled seems to make no difference. Resolution is as far away as ever.

- Francisco Garcia

F*cking Men played at Assembly George Square Studios - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/f-cking-men

Being Gay: Politics, Identity and Pleasure- http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/newformations/09_61.pdf

Homophobic? Maybe you’re gay?- http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/homophobic-maybe-youre-gay.html

Evolution of Gay Theatre- http://www.juilliard.edu/journal/evolution-contemporary-gay-theater

Fringe: Queer Art & Film Festival- http://www.fringefilmfest.com/

THREE JUMPERS // Unearthed Theatre

A council worker watches on as a young man takes a running jump to throw himself off a bridge. He pulls back at the last moment. The young man, elegantly dressed, starts to converse with the dry witted street sweeper and the tone shifts. Things are revealed to be more complicated, as things often are.

Soon we are joined by two others and a queue forms at the bridge. A queue of suicides. They start to squabble and confer and details start to drip down to form a patchwork of connections. Unemployment, childlessness, the absence or death of love. The mutual connection through one female character.

Three Jumpers treats suicide as something more than just a one-off kind of ultimate madness, or a sudden burst towards self-annihilation. It shows the sometimes farcical, even grimly humorous faces of self-loathing and depression. It’s all in the conversation- after all, isn’t the absence of dialogue, the feeling that internal suffering is something to be born stoically and alone, that one of the biggest factors in suicide being the biggest killer of young men. It’s not that the conversations are flawless. They are often stilted and spiteful, yet strangely fluent in the way that desperate peoples conversations often are.

The play unfurls like a morality play without a moralising streak. Through its humor and subtlety it shows suicidal tendencies not as aberrations, but part of the complexity that constitutes being human.

- FG

Three Jumpers played at Greenside @ Infirmary Street - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/three-jumpers

Self-Determination: A Buffer Against Suicide Ideation- http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2012-Bureau_SaLTB.pdf

From Beckett to Stoppard: Existentialism, Death, and Absurdity- http://home.sprintmail.com/~lifeform/beckstop.html

An Essay on Influence in Waiting for Godot- http://www.samuel-beckett.net/Penelope/influences_resonances.html

Campaign Against Living Miserably- https://www.thecalmzone.net/

GENERATION ZERO // Lamphouse Theatre

In a world increasingly mediated and sustained through ever more subtle technologies, it seems appropriate that the protagonists of Generation Zero meet through an online dating app. Their blossoming romance develops through a particular set of millennial anxieties and rituals. The strife at an unresponded message with a read receipt, the bonding over twee children's literature, the small unfoldings of mutual appreciations and desires.

But it’s precisely in the anxieties not shared and the concerns not reciprocated that creates the drama. One has deep ideological convictions about environmental activism. The other sees them as both distraction and oddity. The honeymoon harmony starts to wear off under the pressure of sincerity rubbing up against comfortable apathy.

While the play touches on the notional ideas of surveillance, the disruptive powers of technology and the sheer scale of damage humans wreak on their natural environment, it pales against the backdrop of a much more human scaled drama.

 Throughout, it’s the conversation regarding what it truly means to communicate with those you profess to love, with all of the minor, low-grade incomprehensions, the idea of speaking at, not to, the willful stuffing of ears against opposing viewpoints and the way these lead to all sorts of unmeant betrayals. The underlying irony is that what the audience hears is what the protagonists can’t, that all of the noise and concern that they treat each other and their various worthy causes is no substitute for actual communication.

- FG

Generation Zero played at ZOO Southside - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/generation-zero

Competitive effects of technology diffusion-  http://www.jstor.org/stable/1251581

The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism- https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=1tCUQXgAJhoC&oi=fnd&pg=PP2&dq=environmental+activism+spying&ots=ed06eGOT8T&sig=SjLemW70cVLONo3d7bP80iDnR2I#v=onepage&q=environmental%20activism%20spying&f=false

Undercover police spied on activists- https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/09/undercover-uk-police-spy-apologises-after-being-tracked-down-by-woman-he-deceived

Womens Environment Network- http://www.wen.org.uk/

On the Social Media Ideology- http://www.e-flux.com/journal/on-the-social-media-ideology/