Hi, my name is JJ Davis. I am a freshman who is majoring in Hotel Administration. I hope to have a concentration in food and beverage management. I am originally from Delaware, home of nothing important except tax-free shopping, which makes NY sales tax pretty hard to get used to. I love cooking and occaisionally I play tennis or golf. If you haven't figured it out yet, you will come to see that I like using big words to make me seem more intelligent. I am not dumb, but i am, by no stretch of the imagination, a genius. I am excited to be in college and live the whole experience. The Hotel School has innumerable opportunities for me to embrace.
The phenomenon with which I am concerned is the role of the private companies, like e-harmony, of television's ad-(nauseum)-vertisements, in fostering true lifelong relationships. Are the 24 billion levels of compatibility really that important, or does luck and repitition play a role? Hell, if i went on 4,000 e-dates, I am sure I could find someone with some remotely similar interests. Isn't this just a high-tech mix of speed dating and the weekly classifieds? How can clients be sure they have found the love of their life with an "authentic" picture and "veritable" biography tidbit?
The online space(s) of this "phenomenon", in my most humble opinion, is that of not only asynchronous message boards, primarily, but also secondarily email, and tertiarily the World Wide Web as a whole. Granted, I must say, I have personally neither seen nor used these sites, so my confusion is waranted and slightly unserstandable. Has anyone else used, either successfully or unsuccessfully?
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I have never used nor seen these types of sites either, but I have heard many success stories. I actually know of a person from work who found success on the site and I was in disbelief when he told me they were getting married. He had come overseas to become a doctor and was having a hard time meeting compatible women so he signed up for e-harmony. I’m not sure how long he was signed up for or how many profiles he had searched through before he finally found the "one". Their relationship moved very fast and it seemed uncharacteristic of him to dive into an online serious relationship, but I think they moved their relationship along so quickly because they both feared the same thing – ending up alone. Oddly enough, she was not someone that he would normally go for in appearance, nor do I believe that he is someone that she would’ve sought in the dating world, but their personalities and similar future goals seemed bring them together.
Hey JJ!
Good point--it's interesting to consider whether online dating services really work, or should work. By the way, I don't know if you've seen ads, but your enrollment alone at Cornell qualifies you to join some pretty prestigious dating services (to the tune of "rightstuff.com" or "goodgenes.com"). Ridiculous, right?
Here's what holds me back from calling the whole thing a scam, though: there are certainly facets of a girl's personality that could make her and me an incompatible couple. And I don't have trouble believing that a quantifiable personality test (which is a given in these types of sites) can tell me that I'm more or less likely to have a good time hanging out with someone who's taken the same test. (Keep in mind that the key word there is "likely," since I share your opinion that human relationships involve a good deal of chance and irrational human choice.) So what I envision as the purpose of these sites is to try and cut the people you won't like out of the pool of people you might like. And as much as I would love to criticize those prestige-hawking sites I mentioned previously, I can't help but wonder to what extent the similar background and intellectual ability implied by a girl's graduation from a particular school might affect my ability to form a relationship with her.
But the ads really do suck. I'd like to see some actual statistics at work (rather than "here's five couples [out of the thousands that joined our site...] that worked out!" Maybe those statistics just need to pile up as the sites get older--either way, these sites can at least claim a noble purpose and another good way to harness the information-sharing potential of the Internet.
I am also interested in this phenomenon of “falling in love” online. With the multitude of stories about deception and fraud involved with meeting people online, why do people continue to go online in search of their soul mate? Why do some people automatically assume that the stranger they talk to online is telling the truth? In the article about “Joan,” so many people felt hurt when she (he) came out that Joan was not Joan. I think that the computer gives people a strong sense of anonymity and as a result, people may do things that they normally would not do face to face and become more trusting online than they are in real life.
So do these companies, such as e-harmony prevent the fraud and deception? It does not appear to be that hard to write an exaggerated biography and post a picture that looks relatively like yourself. According to the commercials there is a great success rate, but I have to agree with JJ that it seems questionable to find the love of your life online. Will this be the trend of the future? In future generations, will it be the norm to find a spouse online?
This area of online space was an interesting example that I hadn’t considered before writing my blog post. I agree that this internet source fits into the asynchronous discussion forum category as well as the category of email because the latest online spaces are too complex to fit within just one of Wallace’s described environments. I also agree that these online dating sites seem like they could not possibly be successful in finding individual’s lifelong partners. I really do not think that I have one friend who has ever thought of using such a tool. However, I think it is important to acknowledge that advertisements for these sites are not directed towards our generation. Rather, they are popular among the single, middle-aged adult population. I find this interesting because the internet, in general, is a phenomenon most widely utilized by our generation but this is one domain, in which, our parents seem to control.
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