A little while ago we posted a video making a joke out of the stereotypical but not universally true awkwardness of male geeks, particularly around women, and the comments on the post exploded. For every guy who came in to say, reasonably if perhaps with little humor, that all dudes aren’t like that; there was a guy there to tell every woman who’d commented to say she’d known guys like that once that her personal experience and anything she’d ever done based on it was wrong. It was a clusterfuck of anecdotal experience and gendered slurs, and the only thing it really made me want to do was get all the commenters in a room and say, loudly and clearly: “I’ll make a deal with all you dudes who are angry because this is how your demographic is portrayed. You let me have this one video making this one joke, and I will let you have the entire “fake geek girl” meme, comprising hundreds of jokes, many of them misogynist, that perpetuate the idea that women never do anything you like unless it is to “get attention” and then betray you when they get it. This should seem more than fair.” Because that’s what the idea of the “fake geek girl” is all about, right? “Oh, she’s just doing that for the attention.” Which, by the way, is also a thing said when women claim they’ve been raped, or beaten by people close to them; it’s one of the foundational assumptions behind the reasoning that women lie or will lie about being raped to get abortions; it is the idea that excuses the behavior of a society that minimizes the concerns of women.

This reminds me of the time I swore off Mr. Rogers (I believe I was 4). He took out his rain coat and began telling the audience why such an item was handy. Then he asked if any of us had a raincoat. I ran to get mine and show it to him.  By the time I got back, he was talking to Trolley and about to enter The Neighborhood Of Make-Believe, while I breathlessly waved my raincoat in the air, yelling, “Here it is, Mr. Rogers!” I was pretty miffed. The seeds of a two-way conversationalist: sown in 1976.

I’ve been goofing around on the social discovery site Tagged for hours now. It’s like watching a train wreck. Seedier than MySpace in its seediest days. Its emphasis is on getting to know people you haven’t met yet, not connecting with people you already know (though you can do that too). They differentiate themselves by being a social discovery site, rather than a social networking site.  

To me it looks like a random hookup generator/prostitution facilitator—an interactive craigslist adult services section, so to speak. Why else would a person want to connect with people she hasn’t met yet? One could argue that someone might want to meet strangers for legitimate (read legal) business purposes, like real estate sales, insurance sales, freelance writing and the like, but isn’t that what Twitter’s for? And shouldn’t the strangers have clothes on in their profile pics?

This is the first reasonable online dating do/don’t list I’ve seen. It’s interesting to see what the element of technology brings to the dating experience (additional communication channels, an easy in or out, a portal for voyeurs) and what it takes away (non-verbal context, the beauty of randomly meeting and then falling in love, the slow burn of an in-real-life crush).

The other day a friend said in an email to me that he was starting to see OkCupid as “one big, electronic barroom”. I initially read this as “one big, electronic bedroom” and didn’t think it strange. There’s a lot of predatory behavior on online dating sites. Still, I would like to believe that some of the people there—especially the ones I find attractive and interesting—are there to connect in realms beyond the corporal.

I keep asking questions…

One of my friends said recently about his online dating experience that he thinks he has actually eliminated people from his ‘candidate list’ who he might have otherwise considered dating, had he met them in person first. In other words, he sees disqualifiers in some profiles that he might have overlooked had he met a woman at the grocery store, liked her and discovered these traits months later, after it was too late. I don’t understand why anyone would regret the opportunity to identify deal-breakers before things get complicated by feelings.

I keep asking questions…

Is someone you love feeling bullied? There’s an app for that. Those who feel they are being bullied can access a website, a Facebook app, and now an iPhone app called Over The Line.

Here’s how it works: A visitor posts details about his experiences and his peers vote whether the experience is within the boundaries of respectful behavior, over the line, or somewhere in between.

The aim is for the app to help guide young people toward treating their peers more humanely, but I think the beauty of the app lies in the validation it gives would-be bullying victims. People are less afraid to stand up to a bully when they are cloaked in the anonymity the Internet provides.  A key component of bullying is a resistance-free path to the victim. If just one person sides with the victim—even on the Internet, the bully loses power. 

Well, isn’t this clever? Or is it creepy? Maybe a little bit of both. Wheretheladies.at scrapes foursquare’s API for checkins by members with names that typically belong to the ladies, and tells the fellas where these checkins are happening. Currently the site only has info on checkins in San Francisco, but plans to track down the fairer sex in New York, LA and Minneapolis are in the works. There’s also an iPhone app on the way that has a simple, yet purposeful interface. 

The TechCrunch article compares Wheretheladies.at to AssistedSerendipity, a site that also scrapes foursquare’s API for checkins. Unlike Wheretheladies.at, AssistedSerendipity is an equal opportunity love connector. Sign up and decide which venues you want to monitor and when your ‘optimal’ male-to-female ratio is achieved at any of these venues, you’ll receive a notification. Then I guess you are supposed to go out and get your freak on. 

The thought of an app that tells men where bunches of us have congregated (I am a lady, by the way), kind of creeps me out. What do you think—stalker-ish or a harmless assist?

And now, to lighten the mood a little bit, here’s a post from an old, now neglected blog of mine. It’s about a time when technology—or rather the humans using it—foiled a possibly perfect union.

I intend to use this blog as a platform to discuss our social behavior in the context of emerging social technologies.  I’m posting this piece, as heartbreaking as it is to read and think about, because it illustrates the points I am trying to make in a very sobering fashion. Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei used Twitter and iChat to engage with their friends in the cruel and grotesque harassment of Tyler Clementi. While these social platforms tied those who participated in this ultimately devastating bullying activity together, they served to cast Tyler Clementi so far outside the circle, he could no longer see a place for himself.  He felt so separate that he ended his very promising life. To the loved ones he left behind, he left this message on his Facebook page, “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry,”. Those people have connected with each other, via a memorial Facebook page in Tyler’s honor. 

Dharun Ravi exchanged tweets about the videos of Tyler with Nikhil Mashettiwar while the bullying was taking place. What surprises me, and saddens me, is that no one in their social network saw this and spoke up in time to help Tyler.