OKCupid: Love's Elephant Graveyard

It was just after the New Year I signed-up. It’s a common thing that 20-somethings start looking for something more after graduation. Something more meaningful in their lives. Yes, there comes a point when a young, yearning heart must find a release. And with a lack of a smartphone meaning I was unable to access better alternatives, I made do with the best resource available…

Image courtesy of James Longhorn

OkCupid.

It’s easy to take the piss out of online dating sites, there’s nothing more cringeworthy than people earnestly ‘looking for love’- the sort of people who spend evenings listening to Back To Bedlam, weeping gently because they can’t ‘find the one.’ But the basic premise of OkCupid actually makes a lot of sense: everyone’s fucking lonely, so why not answer a load of questions and  get matched with people similar to yourself? At least it means you can avoid the sort of women who’d casually drop ‘the superiority of the white race,’ or ‘positive effects of eugenics’ into conversation.

But even for all the algorithm determined matching, it still comes across as a less subtle version of MySpace (and remember the subtlety of ‘pc4pc?’). With boobshots, dickshots, dogshots, catshots, hi-res, low-res, and all the other shit that results from internet anonymity. My profile pic choice was b&w selfie: opting to cast myself as a brooding byronic-hero amongst the rabble of social-recluses and wannabe pornstars. 

I got a start on my profile, hitting the brick wall of how to present my drug, alcohol and cigarette intake (does anyone in their 20’s not dabble?)- ultimately deciding that as I don’t drink bottles of Smirnoff in bed I was ‘social drinker’ and as I don’t smoke when I can’t afford to I was a ‘social smoker.’ It also asks you about religion, your love of animals, and a other questions designed to turn the best of us into the untruthful cretin beneath.

"I'm a poet, do you want me?"

Searching through the dating profiles (and writing my own) I got the sense that nobody has any idea what they’re doing. The process of consciously selling yourself to members of the opposite sex is so foreign to us that nobody could be good at it. Not that it’s that important. Online dating is essentially the process of trying to convince stranger you’re not a serial killer: I figured pretty much anything is fine as long as it isn’t creepy.  Still, there were a lot of 500-word ‘about me’ diatribes, I suppose it's hard to know how to sell yourself to other people faced with questions like 'what are you really good at?' and 'what's a secret you wouldn't tell anybody?'

The strangest part of distilling yourself into a paragraph is that it forces you to genre-ise yourself, so that everyone becomes a certain type. Based on matches my top types were (primarily determined by the fact I’m quite into politics and not against abortion): raging socialists and feminists; tea-gin-cats-cake feminists; and art students. It took about an hour until I realised the algorithm matching wasn’t that important anyway, and that for most people, everything was pretty much redundant besides whether or not they were fit. If they were called Coco and used bake sales to smash the capitalist-patriarchy I guess it would be an algorithm assisted bonus.

Having set up my profile I started trying to make contact. I think the messaging part is probably the part of online dating that takes the most getting used to. The fact that it’s all done via the internet meant I constantly had to remind myself that it was a real person on the other end of the messages. I imagine it’s probably this sense of not interacting with reality that begins some men's online sleezy descent, from donning a tank-top and flexing their abs; to posing topless and asking to see women tits; eventually culminating in their becoming one of the penises on chatroulette. 

It was during the messaging stage that I began to realise that all in all it’s a pretty dull experience. Its fundamental flaw is the lifelessness of digital communication. Even beyond the standard MSN “how r u/ wuu2/ how u doin?” convo, without the nuances of human face to face interaction, flirting ( ;) ) and discussing  shared interests are rendered lifeless.

In profile

Everything about the process feels forced. It feels as if nobody really knows what to say. For instance, people seems to really love discussing their hangovers. But I’ve never really understood why grown adults think alcohol is cool. Sure there’s some street cred to it when you’re 15 with a 2litre bottle of Strongbow and half a pack of JPS. But once it’s legal surely it’s just something that allows to interact with strangers and/or momentarily forgetting how shit life is. It’s pretty much a conversation killer online, beyond rating your headache out of ten, what is there to say? 

So having had multiple discussions about the Smiths and Amelie (which seems to be really big amongst the OkCupid community) I came to the realisation that it was all just too manufactured. Sure, if your sole intent is to find somebody because you feel it’s all that could make you happy, then maybe it’s worth it. Or if you’re too shy to find somebody in the real world. But everyone else? You should probably just get out there and talk to people- real people.  Surely there's more to finding love than the monotony of a keyboard convo. 

Besides, everyone knows you find love in the place you least expect it. Like power-hour in that club that serves cheap doubles, or Tinder, yeh, maybe Tinder...

Words: James Dawson

Journo's Journal: The Value of Words

Words: Graeme Roberts

On 1st October 2013 I started my career as a journalist with Basketball Magazine, a monthly print publication reporting on basketball in Britain. These posts are supposed to capture my personal thoughts as I enter the world of journalism.

As a new magazine, our team is small and for my job I have to do more than merely provide content. The biggest challenge for me is not composing articles and features, but driving interest in the work I help to produce.

The task is not helped by what I consider to be a devaluation of the media, due in no small part to the plethora of websites allowing free access to it. Fear not, the irony of this article appearing on a free blog is not lost on me. 

Am I suggesting that websites should not provide intellectual material without a financial transaction having taken place? No. But I am saying that the existence of these websites has been a major contributor to the decline of print media and it means that fewer writers are able to make a decent living from their craft.

It could be blamed on market forces, with technology a helpless accomplice, whereby consumers choose to read free material because it is free. And why wouldn't they? Who on earth chooses to pay for something when they can get the same thing free elsewhere?

The problem is, it is often not the same thing. Material that appears on a free website is free for one of two reasons: the hosting website earns a reasonable amount of revenue from advertising or other avenues, or the material is not good enough for people to consider it worth buying.

It is hard to imagine that newspapers generate more revenue this way than they did when their publications were only available in print. How else do we explain the likes of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation fighting back and charging consumers to read their digital content?

The emergence of televised news has hurt newspapers much more than magazines as there is a greater overlap of content.  But newspapers still have their place as providers of in-depth news coverage and as vehicles for the expression of expert opinion, amongst other advantages. 

I will admit that before I started my job as a journalist I thought that newspapers charging for digital content was a bad thing, idealistically believing that the media should be free and that corporate greed was the driving factor behind this move.  But as a writer, I recognise that my work has value and should not be freely available unless I choose to make it so.

As a rookie journalist, I am providing some work to a small selection of freelance clients for little or no charge. For one client, a charitable organisation, I provide free material because I support their work and have done in other capacities for a number of years.  In the case of other clients, I am prepared to take a financial hit in order to help to establish myself as a reputable writer. 

I would rather have my work out there than not, but then again I would rather be paid than not. As it stands, I am fortunate enough to be getting paid to write for a living, but professions like mine will only continue if enough people acknowledge that high quality writing - like any good art, service or product - has value and ought to be paid for.

I am not saying my work is perfect or grossly superior to the next writer, but it is of a standard which reflects the completion of a first-class honours degree in English and Creative Writing and years spent honing the craft to a professional level.

My work has only recently started to be published in print for the magazine and digitally for one of Britain's biggest local newspapers, the Manchester Evening News.  I have already had to take steps to prevent others plagiarising the work which has been published digitally.  While this may not itself be the firmest indicator of quality, it does hammer home the dangers of material being free to access for anyone with an internet connection.

We have seen the same issue arise with music and films. There was the famous Napster case spearheaded by rock band Metallica, which lost them some fans but helped to preserve a lot of musicians' incomes. There is also the more recent enforcement of laws which protect intellectual property by shutting down and blocking access to torrent sites. 

Such measures are necessary if we as a society truly value the work of our artists.  And for me, we should value our artists, because if we don't, we risk losing many of our finest minds to other fields. 

If that happens, the world will be a much duller place, but I am confident that it will not happen. The internet is still fairly young and its creases are in the process of being ironed out. 

You could argue that the emergence of digital media gives more writers an unprecedented opportunity to present their work to the world, but the drawbacks are manifold.  Such writers are likely to earn little or no money from their work, especially if the website hosting it is free to access.

Thankfully, in our Wikipedia age, businesses and consumers alike are growing increasingly aware that free art - be it music, film, writing or any other art form - is less likely to be good art.