Posts Tagged ‘relationships’
OK, that headline might be an overstatement. But For thousands of lonely hearts out there technology has made a marked improvement in their social and dating life. With so many Social Networking sites available your chances of meeting someone interesting to meet for coffee are pretty good. Of course with that comes the caveat of “Beware of Strangers”.
I did a little bit of web research to find some statistics on dating and social networks and it seems a lot of men and women have moved from the more traditional online dating sites to Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and the other networking sites. Why?
I don’t want to be accused of stealing what somebody else wrote about the topic so I am telling you now I got this off one of the sites I visited called Social Networking Watch:
Mark Brooks, a social networking and online dating analyst, says safety may be a driving factor. Pew Research reported earlier this year that 20% of adults on social networking sites are there for dating, while 49% are there to make new friends. So people want to extend their social networks, but aren’t ready to date. “Online dating sites offer a level of anonymity, but social networking sites, you can see a person’s friends, how they interact,” says Brooks. “More and more we’re defining ourselves by the company we keep on social networks. It creates a sense of accountability, of safety.” http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/stephanie-schomer/write/more-women-use-social-networking-sites
So this got me to thinking, just how are we meeting new people online? I suppose if you put in your profile you are open to meeting new people, or dating, then you will have droves of eligible (and not so eligible) men and women wanting to be your friend and you have increased your chances of finding the love of your life. Or at least getting a date for Saturday night. But I know there are those that are meeting new people not by putting “I need a date!!” in their status updates but by just being who they are every day, day in and day out.
I have about 250 friends on one of my Facebook accounts. Yes, I have two. One for business and one for family and friends. On my personal site there are probably a few people on there that I had no idea who they were when they made their friend request. After a little backtracking I found they found me either through a mutual friend or they thought a comment I made on someone elses page was stunningly brilliant and just knew that they if they didn’t become my friend their world would be the lesser for it. What? It could happen!
250 friends is a drop in the bucket for some. There are some people out there that must have made some really spectacular comments because their friend list is in the stratosphere! Of course that made me wonder how they keep track of them? And do they really communicate with them? Do they ever look at their page? 5000 friends! If every one them makes a status update a few times a day you would never see them all.
Here comes another verbatim quote , this time straight from Wikinews.
According to Wikinews; the human brain can not handle more than 150 friendships. More research was done by Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Dunbar compared the online activity of those with thousands of internet friends and those with hundreds, before concluding that there was no appreciable difference in their levels of activity. He defined a friend as someone that the individual cared about and made contact with at least yearly. “The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world. [...] People obviously like the kudos of having hundreds of friends but the reality is that they’re unlikely to be bigger than anyone else’s”. http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/People_limited_to_150_friends,_despite_Facebook,_says_academic?dpl_id=149591
So what I am getting at is that out of those people who found you so interesting there are bound to be a few that think “if she/he is so witty on line, they must be even better in person!” and a shy “poke” is given (I still dont’ know what that is all about!) or they start commenting more on your posts and soon a request for coffee is made, a movie is suggested and a month later the relationship status changes to a little heart that tells the world you are taken! You are among the many that found love via a social network!
It is interesting to watch relationships come and go. It is so public! Through Facebook you can watch the first ember of romance bloom and die all within a few weeks. I believe that most individuals would rather not put their status up for display and many do it just to please their significant other. “What? I’m not good enough for you to change your relationship status? You don’t care enough about me to tell the world that we are together? You’re ashamed of me?” Who can put up with the pressure? So you cave in and then what happens when you break up? Do you leave the status as is? Do you want to tell the world that you made a bad choice and didn’t heed the warning signs? But if you leave it as is what if the perfect “one” is out there and passes you by based on that “In a relationship” status?
Not all matches are made ON a social network. Some are made because of it. You meet someone at a club, the bowling alley, through work and they decide they want to know you better. Instead of just picking up the phone to call you they do a little digging first. Your name goes into Google and suddenly your life history is there for the reading. You didn’t know your Myspace was open for the world to see, you wrote a paper that was published, your name was mentioned on your business website, your family tree is online, and this person can find out more about you in an hour than he or she could in six weeks of dating you.
Hopefully everything they discovered about you was great and it made them want to meet you even more. One thing for sure is it will give them plenty of material for those first normally awkward conversations. “So you went to Greece last summer? Tell me about it.” If your not fleeing the restaurant in fear that he is a stalker he can ask you about your Grandma Tilly who died 3 years ago while water skiing on her 93 birthday. He read that in the online obituaries. You were listed as a survivor.
Yes love in the age of technology can be complicated but it can shorten that “getting to know you time” by weeks! You may want to go delete those photos of you draped over a toilet surrounded by beer bottles with your best friend holding your hair away from your face so there can be no mistaking it’s you. Or maybe that picture of you sitting on the fence post mooning the passing cars. That’s really not the best way to make a first impression. Is it? I suppose it depends on the kind of person you are trying to attract.
Excuse me now. I need to go Google myself.
Tags: dating, facebook, humor, love, myspace, relationships, social networks, twitter