An article on online romance from last week's New York Times offers some good anecdotes about online dating, especially in terms of overlapping relationships, and using such services over time. Egan makes a good point as well about shifts in personal time senses, rapidity driving the turn to the net.
But why do so many discussions of online relationships narrow themselves down? "Love in the Time of No Time" is a good example. We read about the importance of online presence, but nothing about the world of human-computer interaction, interface affordances, the erotics of semibodilessness, the psychological differences of screen-mediated communication.
We don't read about the impact of embodied differences: regional, national, age, income, literacy, technological confidence.
Nothing about the burgeoning world of social software, including social network analysis, which is promising all sorts of changes precisely in this world of interpersonal connection.
Above (or beneath) all, what happened to cybersex? The obvious importance and extent of this well-studied sexuality is simply absent from accounts of on-line dating, all too often. Is it a disciplinary gesture of social sciences vs humanities, or neopuritanism? catching the meme of internet dating becoming more respectable? or an attempt to avoid the internet's reputation as zone of the unchained id?
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