Last week, after a series of wreckless weekends, a failed date, and the crushing realization that I'm half way done with college, I came to the conclusion that I needed a change. Naturally, the first place I looked to for that change was an online dating site. OKCupid is definitely not for the faint of heart. The site incentivizes you to answer more and more questions by reminding you that the more you fill out, the more public your profile will be. Delicious.
So in my crisis mode, I decided to join partly for laughs, partly because my friends were doing it (a little peer pressure never hurt nobody) and partly because I would like to meet people outside my usual social circle. Men-type people. My first mistake, though, was thinking that at the age of 20 years old, I needed to be advertising myself as a hot commodity in the virtual world. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we kids these days insist on embarrassing ourselves regularly?
Maybe it's because if you turn on the TV at any given point in the day, you will see young people doing a whole host of things that make no damn sense. There's Fear Factor, Jersey Shore, Judge Judy, Teem Mom, For Love or Money, I Love New York, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, etc. The amount of "reality" we consume that is based on pure self objectification and humiliation is astounding.
One of the first reality shows was The Real World, which aired in 1992 and which was filmed in New York City. It basically centered around a group of diverse young people doing hood rat things with their friends/ roommates in a giant, unaffordable New York loft. I'm willing to say that this show can be viewed as a predecessor to some of the tomfoolery seen (sometimes by me at my weakest of moments) on TV at any hour of the day.
This sense that the institution of being young involves self-ridicule and humiliation seeps from the TV screen onto the computer screen, too. You don't have to search Facebook long before you find pictures of people you awkwardly-don't-know-but-are-"friends"-with-anyway doing things they shouldn't if they happen to ever want a job in the future. In fact, a recent study by HGSE Prof. Howard Gardner and Research Director Carrie James suggests that teens and young people's social responsibility and ethics are sometimes compromised while surfing the web. No surprise there, given the recent string of teen suicides as a result of cyber bullying. As fun as it is to access any and everything at whenever one wants to on the internet, it's also a terribly dangerous tool.
And no one knows that better than I do after spending half a week on an online dating site. Though I gave answers before about why I decided to join the site, I really can't think of any logical reason why I did it. It could have been because of those damned eHarmony commercials that lie and say "1 in 5 couples meet online now." The point is, when gregarious and personable friends tell you how easy it was to find people on the internet, don't lie to yourself by saying that you're just as outgoing as they are if you really aren't. I guess even over the internet, people can still tell that I'm shy.
It really is an unnecessary humiliation, though, to watch as 55,000 people are online and none of them of them contact you for days at a time. When you're able to track the number of people who could be interested in you but who aren't contacting you, it reinforces whatever insecurities you might have, whether they're reasonable or not.
My question about all this belief that youth= intentional, self-sacrificing embarrassment is this: have young people always been inclined to be this masochistic and finally just now found the tools to act on those desires OR has technology ushered in a new age where youth culture has been taught that this is the only way to exist? If my half week stint with OKCupid has taught me anything, it's that putting yourself out there might be really cute in real life but not as hot on the internetz. What's up with that?
