Technoromanticism is a philosophical book written by Richard Coyne with the subtitle: digital narrative, holism, and the romance of the real.
In Technoromanticism, Coyne shows how narratives about the computer, and high technology in general, are grounded in Enlightenment and romantic traditions. Because of these narratives grounding, discourse about technology is subject to very similar critiques of the Enlightenment and romanticism
The plan of the book is divided into 3 parts: unity, multiplicity, and ineffability. In the introduction, the reader is given a summary glimpse of technoromanticism as an attempt to establish political unity through information, as an attempt to achieve techno-idealism through empirical realism, and as an attempt to achieve a digital utopia. Throughout the work he points out the shortcomings of such endeavors.
In the first part of the book, Coyne shows how IT narratives attempt to transcend the material realm. He discusses how romanticism in a neoplatonic guise provides the allure and seduction of cyberspace and technologies devoted to creating it.
In the second part of the book, Coyne discusses how the philosophy of empiricism is foundational to the modeling of space and time for computers.
What a computer represents is done through coding and code consists of a symbolic language that can be used to model the world around us. However, for Lacan, what is real is what cannot be symbolized or represented. Thus, for Coyne, the computer strongly suggests the idea that there is a fundamental disconnection from reality through the lens of high technology.
Technoromanticism: to indicate those aspects of contemporary culture that ascribe to advanced technologies the capacity to promote the power of the imagination
Romanticism: was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century
Neoplatonism: is a modern term used to designate a tradition of philosophy that arose in the 3rd century AD and persisted until shortly after the closing of the Platonic Academy in Athens in AD 529 by Justinian I
Empiricism: is a theory which states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience