Love in the age of the internet

Our relationships are mediated by technology, surveilled by governments, with no guarantee our intimate words of digital love are private

In John Cheever's book The Enormous Radio, a couple purchase a radio after their old one stops working. What first sounds like static between stations turns out to be their apartment's doorbells and lift shafts and, it transpires, the new radio can be tuned into the conversations of other tenants in the building.

With a growing obsession, housewife Irene Westcott begins to spend her days listening to other people's lives. She wakes up at night to sneak into the living room, to turn dials "flooded with a malevolent green light".