On not dating

Further to last week’s post (which, given that he quoted from the same article in his keynote address on Friday, made me wonder whether Sir Ken might have been reading this blog), some more thoughts on generational accounts of online culture. First up, Danah Boyd on the perils of archived romance:

‘While i’m all down for remembering everything i ever read, just imagine the havoc wreaked on courtship by remembering today. First off, you “remember” interactions that never took place because you read the details of her blog before you even met. Next, all of those blog entries you wrote reminds you of your own emotional naivete because you were in lurve. And now you have the snarky emails and IMs and texts that show that you’re a complete dickwad and are the root cause of all relationship woes. You have the video of your breakup that you watch over and over again to see what you could’ve done better so that you don’t feel like such shit. Oh, and you have shelves of DVDs that prove that your relationship looks nothing like what “normal” relationships should look like (proof through Molly Ringwald). Somehow, just as you’re starting to feel better, you think that it couldn’t _really_ hurt to look at her MySpace. Only you found that she erased your very existence in an effort to delete the relationship out of memory. And you wonder why you’ve stolen every emo MP3 out there.’

[BTW: ‘You have the video of your breakup’?? What the?]

And in a piece that draws on the same history of dating Boyd is discussing, but written ten years earlier, here is Lynn Schofield Clark, from ‘Dating on the Net: Teens and the Rise of “Pure” Relationships’.

‘Because the focus in the Internet date is on individual gratification, teens experience no sense of obligations to the person with whom they are ephemerally committed… if a person fails to show up at the preappointed time, there are no consequences. Of course, this assumes that both parties agree to the lack of seriousness with which such relations are entered into. Denial of a more intimate connection is not out of maliciousness; those who believe that they are experiencing more than simply a “fun,” ephemeral connection are assumed to be not “playing by the rules,” as it were.’

Both writers share similar concerns about the way that young people’s relationships point to wider changes in society: the downside of the desire to inoculate ourselves against forgetting, in Boyd’s case; self-gratification, surface communication and diminishing self-reflexivity for Schofield Clark. And both are interesting framed against the emergence of - and apparent backlash against - Calvin Klein’s new fragrance, in2u, pitched at the lifestyle assumed of today’s ‘technosexual’ (She likes how he blogs, her texts turn him on. It’s intense. For right now).

I can’t help but think teenagers and technology are both red herrings here. Well, that’s what Catherine and I are arguing in our book, anyway. The tendency to hedge your bets against commitment, or as Schofield Clark writes, ‘to feel connected to others’ and ‘experience affirmation in an environment that does not risk [one’s] current social position’ seems to be a phenomenon that has been growing for some time, one that has as much to do with class, education, location and work/lifestyle as it does age or technological proficiency. What seems more significant is that feminist movement has been critical in each manifestation of dating. In this sense, if we can attribute the rituals of dating in public to the shared emancipatory desires of the working class and a rebellious upper class - specifically, of women desperate to escape the coercive, surveillant forms of indenture and obligation the family unit and domestic sphere then demanded - then whose interests are being served by the fluid relationships emerging today? In what ways is intimacy changing, and how is domesticity being affected as a result? She writes on her blog, about to go home to an empty apartment…

And what are we missing by not wanting to live together forever anymore? Because I’m not convinced that living alone has much to do with my best hopes for intimacy or feminism (which aren’t so easily separated).