Romance through online technology

Media Credit: Dustin Davis /The Arbiter [Click to enlarge]

Ever notice the person next to you in class who simply refuses to put their phone away and habitually text message during class?

When you do it yourself you probably don’t consider yourself distracting, or perhaps you think you’re too smooth for anyone to notice.

You’re probably not that sly. Perhaps if you’re attracted to this king or queen of text messaging you find yourself pondering the who and why: “who is so important that they can’t stop text messaging them?” Or “They must have someone. I won’t bother. Why else would they be texting like it’s going out of style?” But it’s also possible the teacher is just that boring.

This romance via technology does not stop with text messaging. In today’s high-tech world it has become seemingly impossible to be socially active without being technology savvy.

Now we have MySpace, chat rooms, singles phone lines and even online dating services.

They even guarantee you’ll find someone. At this point I usually find myself questioning the validity of these services, but then it clicks in that I know people who have met their
significant others online.

In today’s high-tech world, have we lost the old-fashioned courting rituals?

It used to be meeting a significant other required
going out to events and hoping to get lucky and find them. You used to just ask for a phone number but now you ask for a phone number as well as asking if they have a MySpace.

I suppose people are proud of their Myspace pages with their
intricate backgrounds, juicy blogs and multitudes of friends (half of them they have never met in person). People even have their favorite song playing as you browse their page, and I suppose all of this is what people find necessary for someone to fall madly in love with them.

Romance through technology is seemingly endless with constant communication through text messaging, private chat rooms and reading anything and everything about a person on MySpace.

It seems that nothing is left to the imagination. Upon first date you already know this person’s style of life, whether they drink or smoke, their birthday, their hobbies and favorite genre of music.

Perhaps the element of humanity isn’t exactly taken out of the equation, but rather defered to technology. You don’t have to physically go out to meet someone anymore. You don’t even have to go to the flower shop to buy flowers now - you can do it all online.

If you’re not technologically savvy, you won’t be able to keep up.

But perhaps instead of planting yourself next to your computer for two hours or watching your phone diligently waiting for the next message maybe you should go and get coffee, ice cream or a drink with the person on the other end of the phone.

Perhaps we should only rely on technology when it’s needed, and put real world human interaction back into the equation.