Group therapy in a blog.
Funny/Sad or Sad/Funny
‘Modern Love': Having Your Own Cyberstalker
116 years
Amy Klein (who now writes the illustrated column “True Confessions of an Online Dating Addict“) was an editor at Los Angeles’ Jewish Journal when her stalker announced himself on his blog. From then on, she could rely on (and sometimes fear) his attentions. And, as she admits in this most recent “Modern Love” column, she found it “oddly flattering.”
When you’re a journalist, cataloging the words and actions of others, you believe you are granted a writer’s type of diplomatic immunity — inured to being written about, reported on and critiqued yourself. Well, that’s how it used to be, before the Internet.
As Amy discovered, the internet changed the rules, and some bloggers don’t believe that even these new rules should exist. For bloggers who run on attention, giving them any credence fuels them:
I wasn’t familiar with the ethics of blogging (or lack thereof) in terms of what someone can write about you — without fact-checking or sourcing or the other protections that journalists have in place. It was exasperating to have these random claims and judgments about me out there for anyone to read. But complaining about it, as I discovered, only gave him more material:
“About 10 p.m., I was wandering around when I saw the young female managing editor of The Jewish Journal, Amy Klein, dressed as a black cat. I waved at her and she waved a reproving finger back: ‘Don’t write about me on your blog!’ she reprimanded. Rabbi Wolpe then walked by. Amy said to him, while pointing at me, ‘This man is dangerous. He has this blog where he writes about people.’ â€
Writers want to know that we’re reaching people, that the random letters we string together will form a bridge between us and others, enabling us to connect better with people who are actively part of our present and who may be part of our future. Attention is flattering, but there’s a line of comfort that’s different for everyone. In person, when someone crosses a line, you say no, and that should be respected.
It’s been said that a person’s individual blog provides a space where that person can do whatever she or he wants–this is often articulated as “my blog: my rules.” When there’s this kind of feeling of anonymity/immunity in effect 24/7, why should you guard your tongue? Why shouldn’t you be “real,” or totally unfiltered? Why not say what you mean, when you mean it, and to hell with the world and its rules?
What JDate Needs is a Digital Culture Evangelist
916 years
In this excellent, sure-to-become-a-classic post, Leah Jones enumerates a helpful list of “How Social Media Ruined Jdate For Me,” which is less a complaint and more a series of observations about how JDate isn’t living up to the technical expectations of a generation that lives increasingly online, and which increasingly requires more advanced features in order to surf and connect effectively.
If Jdate is monitoring any of the blogbuzz about their product and if they care about creating a system that works better (two assumptions, I know), hopefully they’ll take this free advice from someone who could actually fetch a high price for this kind of corporate technology assessment. But we’ll see.
True Dating Tales…
617 years
A friend IMs me today…she says she “NEVER” gets e-mailed on JDate. But in the last week she’s had 3 e-mails:
One from a gay guy telling me I’m cute and he’d date me if he was straight.
One e-mail from a lesbian asking me if I ever get curious.
And the last e-mail was from an Italian guy who is not Jewish and does not believe in religion.
And now, cue the reader who tells me how great JDate is and that her cousins and her best friends met on the site and are now happily married with lots of little rugrats. Also, the reader who tells me that I’m just bitter. And then the other readers who leap to my rescue.
I love you guys!
No Daters Were Actually Harmed During This Simulation…
117 years
You know how speed dating works…after a series of short “dates,” you get to choose the people you’d like to date again. Unless you’re part of Moxie’s proposed new experiment, a modified take on speed dating designed to provide you with an honest assessment of what you’re doing wrong on dates. (Might I suggest the name of “Operation FunHouse Mirror,” to illustrate what it’s going to make participants feel like?)
I like this idea in theory. But I have to thank Moxie for adding the caveat that remarks about personal appearance would not be part of the assessment: “feedback should relate ONLY to the person’s demeanor and non-verbal cues.” Thank god.
In other simulated dating news, Zeenews reported that the “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” series from the late 70s and early 80s inspired this study at the University of Illinois about “how people manage romantic ties by looking at the choices that people make in simulated online dating relationships.”
The online study, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, “took participants through a series of scenarios about a relationship with a fictional partner. Each scenario ended with two options, from which the participant chose his or her response. […] By assessing how much the person trusts, confides in or relies on a current or former romantic partner, the researchers were able to profile the participant’s level of level of security or insecurity, anxiety, or intimacy-avoidance in romantic relationships.”
Gotta have more details? Click here.
Imagine the Implications…
017 years
Apparently, there’s a new computer program that can identify certain types of jokes within a body of text. Or so says the Wall Street Journal, if you can believe that rag.
The scientists gave their program a database of words and examples of how the words can be related to each other. When the program analyzes a passage, it uses that knowledge to find a word that doesn’t fit with the words around it. When an outlier appears, the program checks a pronunciation guide for similar-sounding words that would make better sense in the sentence. If a more logical term is identified, the program flags the sentence as a pun.
New Scientist offers the example of a boy who tells his mother that he has been in the garden so much because “teacher told me to weed a lot.” The program recognizes that “weed” doesn’t go well with “teacher” and that the similar-sounding “read” would be a better fit. As far as the scientists are concerned, the computer gets the joke.
This makes humor sound so technical and boring that I almost never want to hear another joke. It’s like someone explaining to you the chemical reasons that you have “the feelings” for a certain person, or telling you that candlelight isn’t really romantic, that there’s a physiological reason and it’s involuntary, and you’re like “shut up already!”
But still, maybe we should look at the practical implications of such technology…
If computers can apply logical processes in the service of recognizing jokes, maybe this can have implications for the online daters among us. Maybe a search engine could be specialized to weed out actual senses of humor from perceived senses of humor. Or we could enact the “personality filter” to generate a list of profiles where actually having a personality instead of having friend who think you’ve got a great personality ranks you higher in search results.
Oh, Brave New World. Send us the tools we need for success.
Welcome to “Women’s Town”
717 years
It’s like Girls’ Night Out, but one step (or 12 steps) further…
The Chinese government, ever on the watch for how to enhance tourism to a country that was for centuries known as the one where the women bind their feet and where girl babies had less of a chance at survival in the male-dominated culture, seems to have found a theme park angle as yet unexplored by the Disney Corporation. As reported by Reuters:
Chinese tourism authorities are seeking investment to build a novel concept attraction — the world’s first “women’s town,” where men get punished for disobedience, an official said Thursday. The 2.3-square-km Longshuihu village in the Shuangqiao district of Chongqing municipality, also known as “women’s town,” was based on the local traditional concept of “women rule and men obey,” a tourism official told Reuters.
[…] The motto of the new town would be “women never make mistakes, and men can never refuse women’s requests,” Chinese media have reported. When tour groups enter the town, female tourists would play the dominant role when shopping or choosing a place to stay, and a disobedient man would be punished by “kneeling on an uneven board” or washing dishes in restaurant, media reports said.
At the risk of inflaming my male readers and inciting my female readers into a feeding frenzy, I wonder if there might be anything to creating a place that is constructed as a women-governed area, at least as a place where women are, by law, elevated to equality or superiority over men. Most men and women acknowledge the need to bond with their friends–heterosexual men may do it over beers or Monday night football, heterosexual women might do it over margaritas and Sex and the City marathons; lesbians might seek out a bar environment where they show the L-Word on large screens, while gay men might also enjoy margaritas over Sex and the City marathons. (Of course, I’m not saying only straight people like certain things and only gay people like certain things, so back off, people. I’m not stereotyping, I’m illustrating.) But the point is, sometimes it’s just important to spend time with other people like you.
This women’s town isn’t that exactly, it’s more theme parky, which I’m not sure I’m loving. And instead of correcting an imbalance in the power structure between men and women it goes the other way, creating an imbalance of an inverse proportion–there’s still superiority of one gender over another more submissive one, instead of declaring that all human beings are created equal. Maybe the Chinese know their audience a little better than I do–perhaps they’re aware that such equality or superiority can only exist within theme park boundaries, but perhaps there’s something to carving out gender-specific space in our lives.
NYC: C is For Condom, That’s Good Enough For Me
517 years
Ahh, New York City mid-Valentine’s Day hailstorm. As the pellets land on my windowsill, I open up GTalk and note my friend Bronwen’s “status,” which is only a website URL. I click, and discover that New York City is the first city to brand its very own condom. “And it’s NYC to the core,” the site boasts.
I’m trying not to overthink this. And obviously failing miserably. Why does NYC need its own condom? What is “NYC to the core”? (Pollution? The Yankees? Rudy Giuliani?) And how that could be applied within the condom context?
And once we’ve determined what that elusive NYC ingredient or factor or characteristic is, how would other cities tailor and manufacture their condoms? I imagine Rome and Jerusalem would have their condoms manufactured faultily on purpose, to encourage breeding rather than contraception. The Los Angeles condom would likely be made of silicone and each box would come with the person’s headshot and resume. In Chicago, it comes with a scarf and hat so you don’t catch cold. And in Florida, they’re all orange-flavored.
Wanna get your own? Here’s a list of distributors…and Happy — oh, you know.
A Dating Book I Won’t Be Reviewing in the Jewish Week
317 years
Usually when I hear about a book like Eric Schaeffer’s “I Can’t Believe I’m Still Single,” I do an internet search for the publisher or PR agency, send them an email, and ask for a review copy so I can write about it in the Jewish Week. And if the author is cute and Jewish, I might nominate him for Single Semite of the Month. But in this case, I owe a debt of gratitude to a gossip website. Thank you Gawker, for providing excerpts (“I mean we’re men. We’re wired to see a woman, smash her on the head with a bone, drag her unconscious body back to our apartment by the hair, and fuck her”) and saving me the trouble. Somehow, I don’t think the Jewish Week’s quite ready for Schaeffer.
What’s interesting to me is how Schaeffer seems to have become a guilty pleasure of sorts over at the G–they began posting about him, then swore they wouldn’t post about him again, then swore that they’d just do one more post, then one more…if you trace the headers of the Schaeffer posts, you’ll see how reluctant blogging transitioned to full-on taggable addiction. They can’t stop. Partly because it’s their job to snark about guys like Schaeffer. But I think it’s also partly because they love it. Or love to hate it. Or hate that they’re loving it. Whatever. It’s a fine line.
Hiatus to End Imminently: Plus, a Question to Keep You Interested
1117 years
Thanks to all of you who kept checking in here, hoping for new content, finding none, and managing to–in the prolonged interim–check back with some other posts and revisit them. There was a technical glitch or twelve, beginning with erratic internet access and progressing to an issue regarding a lost password. But now it’s all ok. And I’m headed back to NYC, where blogging will re-begin in earnest.
In the interim, I feel that perhaps we need to visit the question of a “dating code” among friends. For instance, it’s been said that “bros” come before “hos.” (Or “sistas” before “mistas.”) So essentially, if your mate likes someone and “calls dibs first,” you back off. This presupposes that the “target” in question would be equally open to both you and your mate, which is not–in most cases–necessarily the case.
Let’s take a hypothetical situation. Consider a tale of three parties: the “target”/object of affection and conflict; the first party, who “discovered” the “target”; and the second party, whose main interest is in maintaining a friendship with the first party, independent of romantic entanglements.
What if the “target” expresses a clear interest for the second party, while the second party might care less and the first party is totally smitten. Does it matter who saw the target first or claimed dibs, if there’s only a real possibility with one person? And should the first and second party agree that their friendship is primary, to the exclusion of all would-be interlopers? And if the first party, acknowledging the “target’s” lack of interest, gives the second party the “all clear,” should the second party employ an above-and-beyond layer of sensitivity and opt out, despite the first party’s AOK?
And does New Year’s Eve ever play a variable?
Don’t pull a muscle discussing this–remember, you’re a little out of shape when it comes to this blog, so re-enter the discussion carefully… see you soon!
Plus, if you want to see photos from the trip, check over at MyUrbanKvetch.com and at my Flickr account.
Dating Advice From Celebrities: Harry Shearer
417 years
What? Harry Shearer’s single? Nope. But that doesn’t stop JDate’s JMag from asking him for dating advice that’s completely unrelated to the promotional tour for “For Your Consideration.”
GREG: You’re a married man; do you have any relationship advice for the singles on our website?
HARRY: Relationship advice… That would amuse my wife, if she heard that question being posed to me – there she is now! [phone ringing]. “Honey, don’t tell them that!†Just when you think it’s important to share your feelings about something is the moment when you should think twice about it…
I really wish he had just advised everyone to take their dating game to 11. Because it’s one higher than 10.