In Jonathan Franzen’s essay: ‘Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts’(2011), he talks about the problem with actual love in our modern ‘techno-consumerist’- society. Franzen starts out by describing the almost infatuated love he has had throughout the years for new gadgets. He considers his ‘relationship’ to his old Blackberry as having been almost like the sort of relationship you would normally have to another person. Furthermore he points out, that our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship. To support this statement he draws attention to the fact that the word ‘sexy’ almost always is used to describe the latest gadgets on the market. Our beloved gadgets don’t ask for anything, but they always obey our smallest winks -instantly. These sexy gadgets substitute the natural and real world, that’s indifferent to our wishes and personal needs. Problematic, Franzen thinks. A related phenomenon is the commodification of love. If you love somebody you should buy stuff for them, whether that would be diamonds as a symbol of your everlasting love or an automobile for Christmas as a symbol of your big wallet. Another nauseating tendency is Facebook and the verb ‘to like.’ To like something on Facebook – and in general, is like a commercial substitute for loving. I must say, as a frequent Facebook user I am embarrassed. There is this term of abuse, a ‘likehunter’ that is being used about a person who is obviously posting things on their profile to receive ‘likes’ from others. The more likes you have, the more popular you are. In relation to the Facebook-conflict Franzen point out that all consumer products – this includes gadgets, devices and applications - are designed to be immensely likeable. These gadgets and fancy devices are created to reflect their owner. If you have the latest gadgets it immediately says something about who you are as a person. But as Franzen points out, if you consider this in human terms, you would find an incredibly compromised person, without integrity and a real personality. So Facebook is a product of this society, where especially young people who communicate mostly via social networks like Facebook and Instagram have to change themselves in order to become likable to other people. Like a gadget, shiny, sexy and always in on the newest trends.
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And I’ll admit it, if you compared my Facebook profile picture to me on a Sunday morning after a night out, you probably wouldn’t even be able to tell it was me. And that’s wrong, but it’s just very barrier-breaking to show someone what you really look like at your worst, because you’re afraid you’ll get rejected or turned down. But Jonathan Franzen has really just touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all the nauseating tendencies this new way of communicating has born. It has become so popular to take pictures of yourself incessantly, after which we click our mouse once and it confirms our ‘sense of mastery’, as Franzen puts it. And while I find his essay very much humoristic, there is a great deal of truth in the message. ‘…trying to be perfectly likable isn’t compatible with loving relationships…’ (p. 10, ll. 151-152.) It’s true. If my boyfriend was expecting me to look like the way I do on my profile pictures all the time, let’s face it, he will wake up one day to find himself very disappointed. There are things that are more important than likability, and that’s real love. As Franzen also states in his title, love hurts. ‘But to expose your whole self, not just the likeable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful’ (p. 10, ll. 193-196.) And that is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerists, because a world of liking is ultimately a big lie. Facebook and Instagram does encourage its users to be their own stage-manager and constantly let the world know what they’re doing and who they’re with, and sometimes instead of actually living my own life I find myself sitting on Facebook or Twitter looking at other people’s lives through photoshopped pictures taken on their new IPhone 5, and ultimately I’ll to go to bed ‘hating’ my life, thinking that I really need a new profile picture for the world to like so I can feel better. This essay makes me think of a proverb I once read. ‘To live without risk is to risk not living’. When you’re in love and are willing to forfeit everything for that person, you’re risking a lot. But when you’re in love, that’s also one of the times where you feel the strongest. That goes well hand in hand with the message this essay is trying to send out to the reader. It was a part of a graduation speech that Jonathan Franz gave on a college in USA, and I think that is very fitting, since this essay is mostly directed towards a younger audience. People my age (18+) use social networking a lot, and they could benefit a lot from this essay. We need to look past the shallowness and fancy gadgets, in order to really see each other for who we really are. Franzen also talks about a more

personal experience he has made on this particular topic. As a young man he liked the nature – so he started fighting for the environment to preserve it. But as he grew older he made a conscious decision to stop worrying about the environment because it didn’t have any personal value to him, and in addition he couldn’t find anything meaningful he could do about it on his own anyways. But it wasn’t until he fell in love with birds, that he started worrying about the environment again, in order do something for them by saving their home. His point with this little story is that his love for birds became the key to a less self-centered part of himself that he didn’t know existed. Suddenly he found something that made sense to him and that he wanted to fight for. And that’s what love will do to you. Someone else will start mattering so much, you would do anything for them. And as Jonathan Franzen puts it, who knows what might happen to you then?

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