E-Lekking: Playful Massage of Shared Space

This is the third of a series of journal posts articulating a multicast approach to online dating.

A rich assemblage of user-authored content--journals, forums, quizzes, questions, even wiki-edits--sets OkCupid apart from pay dating sites. Each modality allows individuals to evaluate and interact with potential partners and potential friends: without resorting to the false intimacy of the "Message into box. Message into box." approach that has been the defining metaphor of technology-facilitated dating since at least the 19th century.

Journals and forums, especially, recreate a sense of proprietary and public space, of place, inhabited by some unspecified number of others, some potential partners, some potential competitors, some neither or both. Quizzes, and to a lesser degree, questions and wiki-edits, provide an opportunity for closer inspection of the plumage of their authors (and, in the case of quizzes, their respondents), whether that display be in the form of humor, creativity, attitude, grammatical competence/arrogance or just shared interests.

In my previous post, a parenthetical aside raised the question of whether hair styles may be influenced by the increasing prevalence of static photographs as media of social interaction. We are certainly all quite familiar with the typographical conventions and explosion of abbreviations that are almost off-handedly interspersed in text to signal tone and stance, these icons having precedents in such pre-Internet notations as Ambrose Bierce's snigger point, and the various incarnations of “love and kisses” in Morse Code. (Such translations are by no means unidirectioinal, as Victor Borge's "Phonetic Punctuation" demonstrates.).

As McLuhan tells us, media create spaces, even media without content, and the horizons of those spaces--the possibilities of expression and understanding--are determined by the medium. Just as a light bulb creates a space articulated by its perimeter, so text and photos create spaces shaped and constrained by those media. Yet even a content-less media has a feel to it, a mood. A desk lit by a florescent ceiling fixture feels different from that of a work area illuminated by a banker's lamp. A party bulb tinted red casts a different ambiance than does a bulb engineered to give optimal wavelengths of light to indoor gardens.

In this sense each of us are, in a sense, media unto ourselves: we each give form to the mood and atmosphere of our own environs. We each are the subtle massage of our embodied shared space, working out the kinks and relaxing the knots as we feel our way. This is what makes journals and forums, spaces in which individuals gather to comment and respond to the comments of others, so powerful. Where the message-into-box model defaults to an awkward and uncertain dyad, with each new journal and forum post, a new negotiation of Gemeinschaft, and of place, opens up.

What's more, as we follow, or stalk, the comments of peers with whom we have found common interest, loose and flexible meshworks of social capital are woven. Our own expressivity acquires an exponent, being multiplied and amplified by the play, the lek, between ourselves and those we select into our peer relations. Rather than "sell" oneself through a profile, in the hope that someone will "buy" with a message, through commenting on journals and forums we exercise our being, riding the teeter totter of back-and-forth interactions, and in so doing, invite others to join in the play.

We have abandoned transaction in favor of transection, of evaluation of others not as profile-objects to approach or avoid, but as beings-being across both time and space, encountered as and when their presence and ours may co-occur.

Yet, there are so many other modalities of being than represented by public comments to journal and forum entries! How else might the power of social networking technology be expanded upon and opened up, so as to further embody and articulate the intricacies of lekking? In my next post, we shall examine one proposal for just such an application.