Relationships, Friendships and Romance In the Digital Era: Questioning the “End of Love”

Internet has become a place where relationships can be formed in various ways and thus it influences current life interactions. This influence extends across various realms, from recreational encounters to cultural exchanges, and from politics to love liaisons. The use of digital spaces calls on sociology to carefully analyze the types of relationships we build and how we nurture them amid applications and platforms: what friendships and romantic relationships have become in this digital era.

Eva Illouz (2019) has argued that Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people's lives, although its discourses and narratives seem silent about the multifarious ways in which relationships end. While sociology has classically focused on the formation of social bonds, Illouz’s book “The End of Love” makes a powerful case for studying why and how social bonds collapse and dissolve. Unloving and non-choice have in turn a profound impact on society and economics (expressing the dissolution of personal relationships in capitalism).

This adage needs to be investigated in the context of concrete cases, therefore, we invite case studies of encounters (and “love affairs”) in the context of digital spaces. Researches can concern either real online expressions of “love” (for instance in dating sites) or dating shows (for instance the televisual quite international show “First Dates”) or even fictional popular narratives (films or series such as for instance “Ingrid goes West” or “Euphoria”) expressing cases of contemporary “love”: thus, trying to “define” it as social phenomenon and as myth.