It's known that advanced technologies with their own artificial intelligence (AI) are gaining a bigger part in our daily lives. This AI can be found in phones, in smart homes, and in cars. Furthermore, it can be found in anthropomorphic robots seen in healthcare and in the entertainment industry as two of many examples. These advanced robots have also taken their steps into our friendships, and our romantic and/or sexual lives, in which humans develop parasocial relationships to the robot, creating human-robot relationships. The media has taken a great interest in those relationships, which I’ll call “technosexual relationships”, in which a human is romantically and/or sexually involved with an artificial individual. Oftentimes the artificial individual takes the shape of a so called “sex doll/robot”, which makes the phenomenon of technosexual relationships somewhat controversial to many. Media representations of those relationships are of growing interest, as there’s public curiosity regarding the subject. By also observing how the artificial individual has been framed throughout its history in myths and popular culture in the form of tv-series and films, it becomes obvious that the idea of the artificial individual as a partner and/or lover is viewed as something negative and sometimes even dangerous, a view that has proven difficult to let go off. In this thesis, by asking three research questions and doing a media content analysis, I’m looking to answer how technosexuality “is being allowed” to exist in and by filmed media - focusing on five previously filmed interviews with technosexual persons and their artificial partner(s). The questions, inspired by Stuart Hall’s representation theory, are as follows: (1) How does the technosexual person speak about themselves?, (2) How does the media frame the technosexual person and the relationship during the interview?, (3) Does the conversation change from being about artificial sexuality as an individual phenomenon, to whether society's view on relationships and sexuality are going through a reformation? Results indicate that the technosexual person speaks of themselves as someone who simply prefers a partner that’s predictable and safe, and they usually speak of how they are happier now, in being together with their artificial partner. Furthermore, we can see that the media, to a certain extent, is allowing for the technosexual person and their artificial partner to tell their own story, but that some media producers are trying to manipulate the story being told by editing the story into angled contexts. Finally, we can see that technosexuality is an individual phenomenon that, much by the help of globalized media representation, has begun disrupting and challenges what earlier has been known as “the normal” human sexuality, splitting society into groups of “for” or “against” artificial relationships and their possible part in our understanding of what relationships and sexuality can be.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-177366 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Rydelius, Evelina |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för kultur och samhälle |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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