Week 3 - Blog Posting #5 -Social Media

Navigate the turbulent seas of social media with this handy XKCD map!

(Have I mentioned XKCD is one of my favorite things ever? Well, now I have)

The Did You Know? video we watched this week mentioned the statistic that one in eight couples married last year in the US met online. Throughout the world dating has changed, as evidenced by this article on internet dating in Bangladesh. While there are the obvious means of dating online, online dating websites, there are also more convoluted ways now that social media can help people connect. For a prime example, I'll look no further than how my boyfriend Jason and I got together. The very short version is we met through common friends. The full version, though, is significantly more complex and involves many years of social media use.

To start, we have to go back to 1996. I was sixteen and had just moved from Toronto, Canada to Florida. I was close with many of my friends from my high school in Toronto, and so we kept in touch by mail. Needless to say this was a slow way to keep in touch, so when I heard about free email through Juno not long after my move, my friends and I signed up immediately. Having access to email helped me keep in touch with my Toronto friends at a pace that prevented me from losing touch with them. In particular, it kept me connected with my friend Elena.

A few years later, a free blogging service, LiveJournal, became popular with my friends. We all used this service for quickly letting all our group know about what was going on in eachother's lives. Through both email and Livejournal I was strongly, quickly, and cheaply connected to friends in another country. If left just to mail, I might have lost touch with many of them, but because it was so easy to send quick notes back and forth with email and Livejournal I remained close with many of them.

Now move forward a bit to the early 2000's. My boyfriend Jason had no idea who I was, and hadn't even met the friend that would later introduce us. He had just graduated from a college program and had stayed in touch with one of his professors via email. The professor mentioned a new IT degree at his school that he though Jason would be a good fit for. Had Jason not kept in touch with his professor, he wouldn't have found out about the program. During his studies he met a classmate named Tyler.

Jason and Tyler graduated and went their separate ways, but they kept in touch with email and later Facebook. When Tyler moved close to Jason for a job (that he found online), they reconnected in person.

Onward we move to 2005. After nine years of living in Florida, I decided to move back to Canada. This wasn't that scary a proposition as, thanks to early social networking tools, I still had many close friends there. While I had fallen out of touch with some of my looser acquaintances from high school, my friend Elena had not, and she reconnected me with them, including a friend named Jamie. Jamie and I kept casually in touch at this point, but only through Elena.

A few years later, Jamie started dating through a site called LavaLife. She met Tyler through the site and they hit it off. A few months later, Jamie had a birthday party, which I was invited to on Facebook. Jamie and I were still only acquaintances at this point, and it would have been highly improbable I would have been invited had it not been for Facebook. To add some people Tyler knew, Jason was invited as well. Jason and I met casually, but did not keep in touch afterwards .

A month or two later, Jamie had a problem that she needed immediate help with. Nearly all of her close friends were too far away to assist, so she contacted me as I was significantly closer to her and we were on reasonably good terms thanks to Facebook. At this point she and I became closer friends and, as such, she invited me to go out to the movies with her not long afterward. Last minute, her boyfriend Tyler came along and he brought Jason. After the movie, Jason and I chatted and got to know each other better. We friended each other on Facebook and conversed casually.

I used my status update on Facebook to note that I was desperate to play a particular video game. Jason, who had chatted with me quite a bit online by this point, had the game and proposed having a game night at his house with Jamie, Tyler, Elena, and me. The entire event was organized predominantly online and it was directly afterward that Jason and I had our first date.

The important thing to note here is that this entire process never would have happened were it not for the internet and online social media. The most obvious connection goes back to LavaLife. Were it not for that website, Jamie and Tyler wouldn't have met, and I wouldn't have met Jason. However, an even wider online web was involved in this entire process.

Without the free services of Juno and LiveJournal, I might not have kept in touch with Elena, who reintroduced me to Jamie. Without email, Jason never would have found out about the course that he met Tyler in, and likely wouldn't have stayed in touch with him after they graduated and moved to different cities. Without Facebook, Jamie wouldn't have invited me to her birthday party, where I first met Jason. Without Facebook, Jamie likely wouldn't have felt connected enough to me to feel comfortable asking me for help, and wouldn't have invited me out to the movies with her, Tyler, and Jason. Certainly without Facebook I wouldn't have kept in touch with Jason enough for him to get to know me well enough to know I wanted to play a specific video game and to feel comfortable inviting me over to his home after only meeting me in person twice.

So, not only has social media changed how people directly find people to date, it's also changed how we indirectly look for dates as well. Be it through keeping in touch with friends who likely would have been lost if not for quick and cheap communication methods, connecting with old friends we wouldn't have found without social networking sites, meeting new people brought into our social circle through others' online dating efforts, or growing comfortable with casual acquaintances through the relative safety of sites like LiveJournal, MySpace, and Facebook, it cannot be denied that social media has changed the number of people we can meet, the sheer distances friendships can cross, and the amount of connections we can maintain.