The Scent of Lemons | Technology and Relationships in the Age of Facebook

‘Touch, scent, taste. Three of the five senses that cannot be transmitted through technology. Three-fifths of reality, sixty percent. This book is an invitation to notice that other sixty per cent.’ In The Scent of Lemons Jonah Lynch considers if technology is stealing something essential from us in return for all its marvellous gifts. He writes: ‘I feel the urgent need to clarify my relationship with the technologies which in ever more elegant and hidden ways accompany our lives.’ He wants to understand, starting from his own experiences, how the exercise of attention, the way we see the world and construct relationships, uses or is used by technology. Today many say: ‘See you on Facebook!’ instead of ‘See you at the usual bar!’, what the American writer Wendell Berry calls ‘our lazy willingness to let machines, and the idea of the machine, prescribe the terms and conditions of the life of creatures’. ‘Every place is singular, and every person is unique,’ Lynch writes, and to re-learn this truth it might be necessary to do a little ‘technological fasting’. Not to eliminate our freedom, but to joyfully rediscover it.