Michael W. Clune:

Augustine writes that the experience of a person listening to a song he knows well becomes thin, ghostly. The listener feels himself "stretched" between the memory of the notes just played and the anticipation of the notes to come; he hardly hears the present notes as they pass. But the first time he hears that song, the listener's experience is rich and full. Time swells and slows. His mind, trying to grasp the complex form of the song, comes alive. And then, almost at once, the richness fades. As he beings to understand the form of the song, the song's magic begins to disappear. This is the tragic paradox of our perceptual existence. The effort to grasp the object's form triggers the intense sensory engagement that the success of that effort destroys.

But what if what you felt the first time you heard a song could last forever? What if you discovered an immortal song, a song that never gets old? Listening to it provides you with an experience of unfading freshness, of unending novelty. To imagine such music is to imagine a device for stopping time within time. This music would be like a hand grasping your heart, like a lover's kiss, fused with a star's immortality.

Ron Horning:

By consumerist ideology, nothing could be more enjoyable than a shopping spree. What could be better than exercising one's freedom of choice, over and over again, to get new and exciting things, to have novel experiences tailored especially for our personal delight?

To capitalize on convenience and autonomy in a consumer marketplace, we must first allow our desires to be commodified and suppress the desires that don't lend themselves to commodification. We have to permit more intrusive surveillance to enjoy the supposed benefits of customization. We have to buy into a quantity-over-quality ethos for aspects of life where it has never made any sense, like intimacy.

For online dating sites, the optimal customer is an oversexed solipsist addicted to novelty. But interacting with the sites doesn't have to be a matter of sitting alone at your computer (or staring into a phone) and attenuating your personal predilections as if they came entirely from within and existed independently of social relations. Instead, it can be a confrontation with how little we know about ourselves and how we might aspire to be sure of even less.

Roger Ebert:

I used to believe it was preposterous that people could fall in love online. Now I see that all relationships are virtual, even those that take place in person. Whether we use our bodies or a keyboard, it all comes down to two minds crying out from their solitude.

Tim Kreider's married friend:

It's not as if being married means you're any less alone.