Wednesday, January 10, 2018

A History of Dating in the Digital Age


Yesterday I was digging deep in my inbox for some old photos and I came across an old Gchat conversation with an ex-girlfriend. I was unaware that Gmail archived these conversations and I hadn't thought about this girl in a year or so, so I gave it a click.

OH MY GOD!

I had forgotten what a terrible employee/person I was in Chicago. I guess when I wasn't blogging on company time. I was actively trying to get my gf to cyber chat with me while I was surrounded by middle aged men on the 4th floor of a generic office building in Lake Forest, Illinois. I then searched out my old Chicago roommates, and guess what? My Gchats with them were cataloged too. They essentially read like Evan Spiegel's old frat emails, but worse. This taught me two things:

1. Moving forward, it's probably best to use some discretion on Gchat, especially from a work computer.

2. My ousting from CDW may have been the most justifiable firing of all time. Honestly, not even Hue Jackson is worse at his job.

However, this got me thinking about the way people essentially used to (and still do!) text their way to love. We as a generation have tried to make life as impersonal as possible. Everything is ordered online, we stick our noses in our phones even when with a group, people now make jokes about how much they like to be alone and avoid people. This is very different than the extroverted 90's where everyone wanted to be Tucker Max and smash strangers they met at singles bars.

No.

We prefer to digitally chat with people far away from a safe place. Maybe the technology is harming us as a society, maybe we're already in a Black Mirror episode, but for this exercise I am going to attempt to chronicle the evolution of this phenomenon with a loose timeline I will establish based on eras. Got it? Me neither, but I'm hopped up on Adderall and I'm ready to go. Let's get it.

We'll start with the year 2000 because that's the first time I kissed a girl. (In a hotel on a class trip in Washington DC, NO BIG DEAL!)

2000-2005: The Angsty Away Message Era
The year is 2001, AOL Instant Messenger is king. Every upper middle class kid in America has an embarrassing screen name. A young Hoosier named David Moeller is known on the internet as AFstud39, which of course stands for the poser prep brand Abercrombie and Fitch, after the fall of Abercrombie, David tells people it stands for Air Force. No one Believes him.

Do you remember the adrenaline rush any time you would hear the door open sound? Was it the cute girl I have a crush on? I can't wait to hit her with the most boring conversation ever that would last for 2 minutes max.

But I couldn't get enough of it. I had atrocious grades in high school largely because I would not to by homework. I needed to get onto the internet and TALK TO GIRLS. At some point, it got so bad that my parents took the keyboard away, but JOKES ON YOU MOM. I would meticulously find letters in word documents and copy and paste individual characters so I could talk to people. It took longer than setting the copy for an 1800s printing press but god dammit it was worth it.

And the away messages...
You have not lived until you wrote a three paragraph away message that was directed at a single person. AIM away messages were the OG sub tweets. I wrote poetry, I wrote about my feelings, shit I would leave O.A.R. and Dave Matthews lyrics for people...and any time my mom tried to pick up the phone and kick me offline, I raised hell. In 2001 we finally got a cable modem and I didn't leave the computer room for the next four years, too busy in chat rooms dropping those sweet sweet ASLs.

Effectiveness: Low
Total hook ups: >5
Analysis: While the AAME was a golden age for internet communication, my sheer age was a major inhibiting factor to success. If a girl in westfield would say 'Hey my mom's not here, come over.' Well my parents weren't about to let me leave the house on a Tuesday night at 9pm to drive an hour away. It's a shame really, if I could go back and collect every away message I ever wrote, I would have enough dirt to start a mildly successful meme account.

2005-2007: The Unlimited Text Era
The year is 2005, most major American cell phone plans now include unlimited text messaging. I can T9 a girl 'Come over' faster than I can breathe. AIM is dead, MySpace is dying, a new challenger emerges from the West entitled The Facebook. People aren't quite sure what it is yet, but have realized that lots of :) and lolz via text lead to some quality flirting during class.

I never got a RAZR, which is bullshit. If I had a RAZR in the fall of 2005 I probably would have gotten into ATO, Roo ra rega!

But for Christmas in 2005 I got something even better: An LG Chocolate. Oh God the sexy way that thing would slide up and down. Paired with a North Face fleece and some True Religion jeans, nothing screamed MY HOUSE IS WORTH OVER $300,000 IN INDIANA like a cool cell phone.

The Unlimited Text Era (or the UTE) really changed the game because you could put up millions of shots constantly, wherever you were.

Laying in bed? Text.
In class? Text.
Taking a shit? DEFINITELY TEXT.

I must have shot out hundreds of thousands of texts my Freshman year at Indiana and also everyone was discovering binge drinking for the first time so all behavior was completely excused.

"Did you text me that you wanted to pee on me last night?"
Oh, haha, sorry. First experience with tequila.

That text today would end friendships. At 18 while living in a dorm you might get a response like "OMG I TOOOOOOTALLY get it!!!"

This is also very early era: You up?

If someone was online late in high school obviously they were up. At 3am in college it was a genuine question, and for the first time if they responded 'ya, come over' you didn't have to ask mom and dad's permission.

Effectiveness: Mixed
Total hook ups: 4.3X10^8
Analysis: While the UTE had a relatively low conversion rate, the new technology allowed you to cast a wider net than ever before. Life is a numbers game after all and if you texted 100 people then, well one of them would be up for an adventure. But maybe that's less 'texting your way to love' and moreso just college.

2007-2009: The Rise of Blackberry
The year is 2008. Flip phones and sliders are now considered hot garbage for drug dealers. Everyone that isn't a poor has a Blackberry and a fascinating technology called Blackberry Messenger colloquially known as BBM has taken the country by storm. BBM operates almost exactly like text messaging but carries an air of elitism. It also has a fascinating feature called PING that will makes someones phone vibrate. Drunk frat guys will try to use this feature with limited success to wake up sleeping sorority girls.

Well unsurprisingly I got drunk during Little 5 in 2007 and dropped my Chocolate to the bottom of Lake Monroe. When my parents didn't hear from me for 4 days they drove down to Bloomington to see if I was alive. When they found me fine, they were so relieved that they didn't mind driving me to Verizon to get me the latest and greatest. (This is a sound strategy.)

The game switched in 2007 to a more efficient style of play. No longer were you just throwing a ton of shit at the wall and seeing what stuck, the BBM list was more curated. Getting someone's PIN was a much bigger deal than getting someone's number. A group member got your phone number a chick that you wanted to take to the Valentine's semi-formal got #mypin. It was an open invitation to flirt. A new BBM was worlds more interesting than a new email or a pesky text message. The heart would start to race though if multiple girls were sending you BBMs after 12 o clock. It was almost as exciting as beating the last level on Brick Breaker.

Effectiveness: High
Total hook ups: Enough
Analysis: Though I would like to give BBM a lot of credit for my romantic success in college, I think it's also more indicative of the relative maturity of college upperclassmen. As a Freshman hook up culture is somewhat new and exciting. By the time Senior year rolls around, it's old hat. You know everyone in your circle, everyone without a partner is fair game and hook ups are almost business like. You're cool, I'm cool. We're both fairly attractive, let's do this. It will be fun!

2009-2012: Gchatting Your Way to Love
The year is 2010. Millenials have joined the work force and are not happy about it. Others have gone to grad school to push off the inevitable. Comedy accounts have popped up on the newish social media platform Twitter to document the struggle of trying to "adult." Some are struggling with the fact that their parents have shut off the family 'emergency AMEX' which had for years been treated as a line of credit at their favorite bar. But fortunately, an old stand by is there for them on those cold days in Chicago at the job they hate; their old friend Google.

I was sad after college. Like really sad. I went from being a medium sized fish in a tiny pond to a piece of plankton in the Pacific Ocean. I hated my job, I hated responsibility and the only thing that got me through it was blogging and G chatting chicks all day (and loads of alcohol...shouts to booze for getting me through a tough time! We out here!)

Similar to the now quaint AIM, the rush of joy I would get when that green dot popped on would lift my spirits. And the best part? By Gchatting and keeping the box small in the lower right corner, to the lay person it would look like you were ACTUALLY DOING WORK. Between that and my blog, I must have looked like the hardest working person in the company. That must be how I managed to stay there for two years despite only eclipsing 10 outgoing calls once. (And that was probably me calling other people in the building to arrange lunch plans.)

Honestly, I probably Gchatted my way to two serious relationships just through bonding over how bored we were at work and how much we would rather be doing other things. Turns out a mutual disgust for the mundane can really drive people together! Who knew?

Effectiveness: Extremely high
Total hook ups: Several serious
Analysis: A lot of people in their 20s are a bit down on the world and they're grasping at straws. Their job isn't what they thought it would be yet they can pull some medium comfort by talking to someone online and fantasizing about what they could do together as soon as they left the hellish prison of their 9-5.

2012-2016: Tinder and Other Drugs
The year is 2013 and the millenials have rebelled. Instead of growing up, they have flat out refused and leaned into their debauchery. Eric Prydz is headlining Coachella. Cocaine and MDMA are no longer closed door drugs and their is an app called Tinder that matches people together who are down to fuck. What a time to be alive.

It's amazing that it took this long honestly. It was a concept as old as time. Hot or not, Facebook, a whole host of other online dating ventures: Here is a picture of a person, do you want to have sex with them? Yes or no. This was the fundamental question at stake in Tinder and all of its clones. They made J Swipe which was Tinder for Jews! They made Grindr which was Tinder for gays! They even made shit like The League which was Tinder for people who thought they were classy. None of them were more genius than Bumble though. Tinder for cucks who are afraid to initiate a conversation with a woman!

There was always one of course. One girl in every group that met their serious boyfriend or even fiance on Tinder. That gave the whole crew hope, but sub-consciously they knew what they were doing. They were on a hook up app. Not too dissimilar from the brilliant Black Mirror episode 'Hang the DJ,' they knew they were just sleeping around, buying time, until hopefully, desperately, someone swept them off their feet.

I don't have a lot of personal anecdotes on dating apps because I am staunchly against them, not because I don't like the idea of dating apps, I really don't like the idea of going on dates. Personally I would rather spend $100 on going to see Justin Bieber in concert than going out to dinner and MAYBE sleeping with someone that I'm not that into. Or maybe it's because I had a bad experience getting punked by someone stealing my phone, switching my Tinder to gay mode and swiping right 1000 times.

I was offered back alley blowjobs from strangers for weeks.

Effectiveness: High
Total Hook ups: 0
Analysis: If you've got money to burn and don't mind going out every night, it's probably a lot of fun. Translation: If I was a girl, I would be ALL about this shit.

2016-Present: The DMs Strike Back
The year is 2018, young people no longer communicate through language. They speak to each other strictly in memes, emojis and gifs. No one texts anymore, not even on iMessage. One can gauge how much a person likes them only through content interaction: story views, post likes and of course, the direct message. But again, 99% of these messages are either wink face, kissy emoji or heart eyes. This is not a drill.

I really thought Snap Chat was going to be big. When drugs and nudes were hot, so were they. But like ESPN didn't see the cord cutter revolution brewing, Snap Chat somehow didn't see the death of EDM as a paramount obstacle to their success. The Fappening and other such security breaches scared everyone out of potential future app nudity and now we find ourselves here, on the Instagram story page. No one posts photos anymore mind you. That's for the olds, and to be honest, don't put pictures on your story either. I want professionally edited video content. (Note: This is the only area where the 'pivot to video' was a success)

Teenagers now get famous recording themselves playing video games and doing covers of pop songs on Youtube channels. Some people are swearing off sex for months or even years at a time just because...I don't know, it's a thing? The most famous person in America is a former gang banger/stripper. The President is a former actor from the classic film Home Alone 2 and there are now 712 gender identities.

I personally identify as someone who is confused as fuck.

But...has that much changed?

We're all just trying to figure it out. Dating is weird and we're all low key nervous that we're going to end up alone surrounded by several ornery cats hissing at each other. While circumstances will rotate, I feel dating is cyclical. The apps will die down at some point and singles bars will become a thing again. A new elite technology product will eventually be released and people will use it exclusively for flirting and then the whole cycle will repeat itself until eventually we'll be in a virtual reality room speed dating...just like they did in the 1960's. Dating in the digital age is strange but at the end of the day, it's always just a couple crazy kids hoping to make it work.


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