Expand Your Mind: Fun and Immortality
by Miki Saxon
Summer time and the living is easy—but the thought of a date makes some people queasy…
People may date all year long, but there is something about summer that especially leads to thoughts of romance—or at least lust. Maybe it’s all those partially unclothed bodies…
Twenty and thirty-somethings aren’t hesitant to try new stuff and seem to love tech-driven solutions to the age old problem of finding love, think match.com, eHarmony and others.
Now there’s a new wrinkle in the dating scene.
“…a raft of newfangled dating tools are striving to better bridge the gap between online and real-world romance.
Some companies offer a combination of flirty calling cards and Web pages. Others operate dating applications that use the global positioning systems in cell phones to help local singles find one another.”
Then there is the all-important first date, because what you suggest tells more about you than all the studied (or drunken) prose you post, email or text.
7,000 of the four million single people in New York City have proposed first date on a new site called HowAboutWe.com and crunching them has yielded interesting insight.
New data from a Web site suggests that not only do many people plan similar dates, but like lemmings, they also collectively migrate from one theme to the next.
Gee, sounds a lot like high school.
All this is great fun, but the problems start when you and your new love/lust/friends start sharing all that fun online, because what you post today will be there forever. I was warning about this back in 2006, but not with the authority of Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University. His article is worth reading because what you post could cost you your future as it already has for others—and, no, I’m not being an alarmist.
Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree.
Read the article, then think at least five times about what you choose to give immortality.
Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pedroelcarvalho/2812091311/
