(no subject)
[This is not about current events in my life, but refers to a general trend that I have noticed over several years - one which I have sometimes exacerbated]
Online dating takes communication out of the nest of reciprocity that defines most of our social world.
Confer: Ursula Franklin's "Real World of Technology"
This specializes it for specific appliactions: blind dating; meeting someone who your friends don't know.; if you want a certain degree of anonimity (kinky, queer, cheating, high-proifle, and/or just shy).
It also makes it kinda crappy for fostering ongoing relationships. The vast bulk of my human relationships develop and are sustained via a social backing: work; school; volunteering; religion; recreation; overlapping social circles; living nearby. These systems support our interactions. They give us something to talk about. They put us together week after week. They provide coworkers, fellow students, club members and so on to ask where the other person is.
Without these things, our normal relationship skills are often not sufficent. We do not notice that it's been awhile since we've seen so-and-so because we usually don't see so-and-so - their absence is normal, provoking no sense of loss. If we deprioritize communicating with them, it does not affect our interactions with them. We will not spontaneously encounter them. They can be in our lives... or not. Either or.
That I overlooked this set of problems stems from assuming that communication has an essential form; that it exists in an ideal state like Plato's chair; contextless, like Aphrodite coming to be by rising out of sea foam; that you can date however you like and it will be about the same. But communication is not a default thing that can be plugged into different media. A tongue or a keyboard, a long aquaintance or a blind-date are all different things, despite our wish to be free of context.
Online dating takes communication out of the nest of reciprocity that defines most of our social world.
Confer: Ursula Franklin's "Real World of Technology"
This specializes it for specific appliactions: blind dating; meeting someone who your friends don't know.; if you want a certain degree of anonimity (kinky, queer, cheating, high-proifle, and/or just shy).
It also makes it kinda crappy for fostering ongoing relationships. The vast bulk of my human relationships develop and are sustained via a social backing: work; school; volunteering; religion; recreation; overlapping social circles; living nearby. These systems support our interactions. They give us something to talk about. They put us together week after week. They provide coworkers, fellow students, club members and so on to ask where the other person is.
Without these things, our normal relationship skills are often not sufficent. We do not notice that it's been awhile since we've seen so-and-so because we usually don't see so-and-so - their absence is normal, provoking no sense of loss. If we deprioritize communicating with them, it does not affect our interactions with them. We will not spontaneously encounter them. They can be in our lives... or not. Either or.
That I overlooked this set of problems stems from assuming that communication has an essential form; that it exists in an ideal state like Plato's chair; contextless, like Aphrodite coming to be by rising out of sea foam; that you can date however you like and it will be about the same. But communication is not a default thing that can be plugged into different media. A tongue or a keyboard, a long aquaintance or a blind-date are all different things, despite our wish to be free of context.