SOMETHING ESSENTIAL

Love in the digital age @ blogs.NYT.com. Thanks, Michele! HTEC LIVES!

Communication has been streamlined by the Internet, and something essential to the process of falling in love has been lost. We can type up carefully crafted statements rather than go face-to-face and improvise from the heart, thereby risking embarrassment, vulnerability or Oscar-worthy dialogue. We can Google our way into the museums of each other’s identities — and fall in love there.

If we get up the nerve to e-mail or IM our love interests, we can correspond at a comfortable pace (i.e., however long it takes us to come up with witty, well-crafted messages). They will assume we’re taking our time to respond because we’re busy fighting off that parade of knights in shining armor who are begging to be listed with us in a Facebook relationship. They don’t know we’re staring longingly at that one picture that pops up when we Google them, and we don’t have to worry about whether or not they’re staring longingly back! (Bonus: No one has to deal with that awkward “who’s paying?” question.)

Flirting has been transformed into a digital process. We don’t even have to touch each other to “hook up.” We can just hook up to the Internet.

The difficulty of negotiating what happens in each arena of reality probably explains why the word “awkward” has shot to the top of my generation’s lexicon. My classmates and I charade our way through first dates, trying to keep track of what’s been said versus what’s been read on the Internet ahead of time. We have to fake it through “Where are you from?” conversation, and if we let something slip that reveals we’ve done our research, it’s awkward.

I think the article is fundamentally mistaken. Nothing essential has been lost in the digital age. What has been lost are a few traditions and conventions that are themselves merely blips on the evolutionary radar. Getting-to-know-you conversations are not deep facts about human relationships, but are products of a social arrangement where relationships are determined by the individuals and not their parents and elders. These social niceties gets circumvented by the digital age, but if anything it streamlines the process; it certainly doesn’t undermine it.

The awkwardness this author experiences is but a historical hiccup, a consequence of finding oneself in the transitory period between social arrangements. We know the traditions of our parents, and theirs, and we indulge the tradition because it is What Is Done, even though we know it isn’t necessary. Our children, and theirs, will not feel these pangs of loss for traditions past, but will look on them with the same curiosity and wonder that we feel when we look at Ovid or Austen.

While nothing essential is lost with love in the digital age, what is lost reveals something essential about the digital age itself: its wholesale transformation of ourselves and our relations to each other, and how dimly we recognize these changes even as we make them.