A web of love bytes

Love Online: Emotions on the Internet, by Aaron Ben-Ze'ev (Cambridge, £18.99)

The internet plays strange games with identity. As we all know, half the people on there are pretending to be somebody else: boys claiming to be girls; dirty old men masquerading as teenagers; 18-stone fiftysomethings named "Slinky Mexican Playboy".

And yet, at the same time, thousands of people are using this medium to pour out truth like never before. Just think of that cannibal recently convicted of manslaughter in Germany. All his life, he had secretly dreamed of eating someone. He went online and found a man who, all his life, had secretly dreamed of being eaten. How, in any previous era, could those two people have found each other?

It is perhaps unfortunate that the encounter ended with one of the parties having his penis deep-fried, but there is something undeniably pure about the honesty on both sides. A terrible beauty is born.

Less terribly, lonesome folk all over the world have finally found a forum where they can admit their fondness for women's clothing, their erotic interest in the humble kipper or shuttlecock, or the fact that they can only achieve physical satisfaction when reading the poetry of Pam Ayres, with no fear of serious redress and every hope of discovering a soulmate.

Like oil and water these two groups meet: those who are communicating on an utterly unprecedented level of human truth, and those who cannot type a single honest sentence. This means that the internet is both the very best and very worst place to seek a romantic partner.

The market could certainly do with a good, accessible handbook to help users surf their way across the top of the oil and find the nice fresh water. An atlas, as it were, of the safe and unsafe internet terrains.

And Love Online certainly looks like such a book. It has a catchy title, a glossy, multicoloured cover and a flyleaf which lists sexy topics like falling in and out of love, flirting, cheating, even having sex online.

You might easily mistake this for a breezy, non-fiction beach read. But it isn't. Get the tome home and you will find a densely printed academic work by an Israeli professor of philosophy. To give you a taste, where Professor Ben-Ze'ev's first line might easily have been: "The internet has caused a revolution in romance", he opts instead for: "The appearance of computer-mediated communication has introduced a new type of discourse and consequently a new type of personal relationship has developed."

You're right, this is simply the same thing in unnecessarily long words. Later, in a truly wilful attempt to avoid the word "smalltalk", the professor speaks at length about "nonpurposive conversation".

George Orwell (who would have loved the snappy, efficient language of email) would be speechless with horror.

This is Americanstyle academia: all smart suits and qualifications on the outside, belying a somewhat simple message - like those "experts" who appear on the Oprah show. Aaron Ben-Ze'ev is billed as "co-director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Emotions at the University of Haifa", which I'm sure is a noble seat of learning but how unfortunate that his title should sound so terribly like The Chairman of Codswallop.