At the cinema watching Her, a movie about a man who falls in love with his computer, I looked around at faces picked out in the darkness by the blue light of their smartphones.
A woman on my row stared into her tiny screen with a dopey private smile. A photo of an owl in a hat? A celebrity tweet? A filthy lover’s text? Whatever, her online world was more fulfilling than this communal, real-life experience she’d paid to enjoy.
Admittedly Her is maddening and over-long. And the human-techno romance has been around since Harrison Ford and his hot replicant in Blade Runner. But now computers really have insinuated themselves into our most intimate lives, so what we feel for them is a