It’s A Medium, Not A Message
It's A Medium, Not A Message
Poor David Brooks. He finds the combination of love, dating, sex and cellphones so terribly disturbing. The truth is, human nature hasn't changed; it just has more technology and plays out faster. Brooks wrote in The New York Times:
As the journalist Wesley Yang notes in a very intelligent analysis in the magazine, the diarists "use their cellphones to disaggregate, slice up, and repackage their emotional and physical needs, servicing each with a different partner, and hoping to come out ahead."Often the diarists will be on the verge of spending the evening with one partner, when a text arrives from another with a potentially better offer. To guard against not being chosen at all, Yang writes, "everyone is on somebody's back-burner, and everybody has a back-burner of their own, which they maintain with open-ended texts."
The atmosphere is fluid, like an eBay auction. This leads to a series of marketing strategies. You don't want to appear too enthusiastic. You want to invent detached nicknames for partners. "Make plans to spend day with the One Who Cries," a paralegal, 26, from the East Village writes. You want to appear bulletproof as you move confidently through the transactions. "I have a Stage Five Clinger on my hands," a TV producer writes. "He asks me to hang out again this coming Sunday. I do not respond."
Wow...people have nicknames for people they're dating. Definitely caused by the choice of free ringtones.
Actually, there are times when people are looking for relationships, and times they aren't, and this is reflected in how they talk about and treat their dates. This has been true for centuries, and I'm not just talking about short period in which there have been cell phones in the 20th and 21st.
The column is a actually kind of sad. Typical demonization of technology by an old fogey. Brooks' final words:
Today's technology seems to threaten the sort of recurring and stable reciprocity that is the building block of trust.
Oh, please.
Again, when people are ready to pair up, they will. Trust and reciprocity are a part of that. Until then, text your way to those "continencies" until you weary of it. Not really anything to get teary-eyed over.
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