WGSS Spring Colloquium: "Calculating Couples: Computational Intimacy and 1980s Romance Software" Colloquium for Faculty and Graduate Students

Abstract: In the 1980s, as a new market for personal computing in the home was emerging, a category of software arose that promised a computer-mediated experience of romance. This essay analyzes this category of romance software that brought couples together around the novel technology of home computing. I argue that this software attempts to constitute a particular ideal of computer-mediated coupling that balances discourses of intimacy, based on full disclosure between partners, and ideas of romance that rely on greater novelty and secrecy, by mobilizing the computer as an active party to process and screen the flow of information between partners. This balancing of romance and intimacy was managed in part by alternately presenting these programs as serious tools to stabilize the couple and as playful games that could suggest new pairings. Romance software is significant because in the 1980s, it offered a vision of personal computing as a technology for intimate and interpersonal relationships that resonates with contemporary digital technology.

 

Presenter, Reem Hilu, Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies

Discussant, Diane Lewis, Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies