Ms Strangelove -or how I learned to love the computer

It's no surprise this, when you consider that there has long been a 'love affair with the car'. We do seem to have this ability/drive to form "affective bonds" with the other and somehow our technology is able to sneak into the frame as well as other people and God [which is what these bonds are for -I guess].

"Professor Cary Cooper, an expert in organisational psychology and health at Lancaster university, said he believed that people had a form of "technological umbilical cord" to computers. "That a form of bonding occurs for both children and adults highlights the significance of this technology in our daily lives," he said. "

Indeed, we do need to keep some of this in perspective though. We already have these kinds of bonds with other technologies: Clothes, houses, cars and TV to name a few obvious ones [or is 'clothes' not so obvious because we no longer think of them as technology?]. Much contemporary advertising relies on commodity fetishism [to borrow a bit of marxist analysis and vocab] -which I think is related to this phenomenon.

Perhaps the other interesting thing is the way that such things become invested with personality -and the following quote is interesting: " Catherine Stewart, the community manager at supermarket chain Tesco ... said: "Interactive items are now increasingly popular for both adults and children, which could be a reason why computers seem to be developing personalities of their own". "

I guess on the whole we don't do that with clothes but occasionally I've heard of houses referred to as having personality and I note that teddy bears etc may develop personality to their owners/regular users. It's no surprise then if computers do too, especially as they actually do interact and sometimes the vagueries of different distributions of operating systems, specifications and configurations of programmes means that they all behave slightly differently.

Of course this may all also be related to the Feuerback/Marx/Freud hypothesis on God -we tend to make God in our own image or to meet our needs; clearly we do this kind of things with our own technology. This proves nor disproves God's existence of course, merely that human beings have quirks that result in projection.