Ourview
Love
Web sites too impersonal
Somewhere deep within our psyches lies the
burning motivation to find another person
to share our lives with, or, at least, to
go on a date with on Valentine’s Day.
College students have been turning to the
Internet for a little help with love these
days. Thank God for technology.
Online dating services have been popping
up around the country and many have been
targeting college students in particular.
A company that already runs more general
online dating services started CollegeLuv.com.
This site asks for gender, sexual preference
and zip code, and with this vital personal
information, you are directed to a list
of potential mates.
Michael Mason, a North Carolina State sophomore
who started CampusFlirts.com, said that
he saw a need and decided to fill it.
“It used to be that no one wanted to tell
their friends they met someone online,”
Mason told CNN. “That stigma still exists,
but I think it’s really starting to fade.”
The stigma is really not starting to fade.
Are people just getting more desperate?
Nearly 4,000 people signed up for a graduate
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Jonathan Monsarrat’s free temporary site
that helped students and recent graduates
from MIT, Harvard and Wellesley find dates
for Valentine’s Day.
Nearly 4,000 college students cannot communicate
with people in their classes and at parties
well enough to ask for a date for Valentine’s
Day in person. Using the impersonal love
medium that the Internet has evolved into
seems to be the mode of choice for young
people to conveniently find other young
people to hook up with.
But love is love, right? Can we, in good
conscience, criticize the way in which a
person finds love?
Students these days are busy folks. With
classes and work, it is difficult to find
time to devote to the search. And the search
is an essential element in anyone’s life.
In our society, and many others, we are
considered failures, in a sense, if we fail
in the search and spend our lives alone.
People are scared to death of never finding
that special someone, so we frantically
add our names to online lists and attempt
to sum ourselves up by listing our favorite
color, movie and band. Armed with this information,
we go hunting on the Web in search of a
date for Valentine’s Day, mainly because
we are failures if we don’t have a date
on the most pathetically commercialized
designated day for love.
We cannot criticize sincere love. Love is
love, and good luck to those who do find
love on the Internet. But they are the exception
and not the rule.
These love Web sites perpetuate some of
the problems we experience in our society,
mainly our trend of making interaction with
others more and more impersonal and the
pressure we feel to find a significant other
regardless of the method. Meeting people
at bars is not much better, but at least
we can assess the chemistry on a personal,
human basis.
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