Sunday 27 April 2014

Tinder? This isn’t speed dating, this is "speed dumping"


Tinder. It’s an App that does for dating what Facebook did for friendships - cropspraying a cloud of potential dates at your phone and asking you to address the complex issue of your personal attraction towards them by moving your thumb over a animated button. In other words, it’s the entire seduction cycle reduced to 0.45 seconds. This isn’t speed dating, this is speed dumping.

Dumping 2.0 
Though you’d probably expect this blog to raise its concerns with such a blinkard approach to human relationships, this blog isn’t going to, because as far as I can see, speed dumping is nothing new. In fact it's no different than what goes on on the average Saturday night dancefloor across the country. Let's face it, humanity’s been perfecting ways to dump people for centuries; what is evolution itself but precision-engineered, systematic dumping?

Dumping each other links us back to our history, our cultural past. What, after all, is the difference between the artful coquettes and fan-waving of Austen's England and a crowd full of moon-eyed clubbers vomiting MDMA-spiked chasers on one another in the toilet of a Romford nightclub? Dumping people now comes with exciting twenty first century frills and swipe sound effects, and we should celebrate it. This is dumping 2.0.

Do I know you? We’ve only got 158 friends in common
In any case, Generation Text is quite used to reducing complex emotions into messages of maximum accessibility, as anybody will know who’s ever consoled anyone over the death of their children by sending them a text saying ‘Hugs’ followed by a smiley. Since 2011 humanity has largely streamlined the subtelties of human expression down to clicking on a Facebook ‘Like’ button, a creatively ambiguous phrase that can lead to some suprising exchanges, such as this one that appeared in my newsfeed: 

 Some of you knew we were getting married and still to this day almost three months later haven't said a thing. That tells me you're probably jealous that two people, neither of whom is you, have found each other and are happy about it while you're a disgusting turd who loves themselves more than anyone else and whose longest relationship will probably be with someone you have to pay.


7 people like this.

Among the comments this was my favourite:

 I clicked Like. Was I supposed to send a present as well?


Somehow that says more about Facebook than an entire Aaron Sorkin screenplay. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got better people to talk to. Consider yourself dumped.