Love & Texting

Provoking piece in the Styles section of the Times today. They've been doing this "Modern Love" series for a while and this column was one of the more interesting installments I've read so far. It's about an American student who moved to Thailand to teach English shortly after graduating from college. One of her students (college-aged) fell in love with her and the story is about their interaction while there and then after she returned to the States. An excerpt:

Text messaging and chatting are the modus operandi, and everybody seems to consider it a tragedy of modern romance that these forms of communication make it so frighteningly easy to say nothing at all, to forge a relationship out of little more than a few well-timed expressions: “Where r u?” and “Want to meet up?” Maybe...expressiveness seems strange to us, or pathetic. But it has something to teach us, too, about the note of cowardice embedded in our romantic culture, about the intensity of emotion we have a right to, about everything we could say, but don’t.

...Word.

Facebook Kills Relationships

Throughout my time on Facebook, I've run into more than a few little mishaps and argument starters that are unique to this website alone. It's a purely generational thing, and I wonder if it's more or less universal than I think it is. Before Gen Y, you could go to parties, take photos, be in relationships, engage in harmless flirting -- and no one would be any the wiser. But now, there is a ridiculous amount of access to people, their social lives, their relationships, and other rather intimate details. Is this something that every generation after us will have to deal with? I guess with them it'll just be the way things are, since they'll have actually grown up knowing no other way. People get into fights about whether or not to post "in a relationship" on their pages, over sketchy wall posts, out-of-context photos, and much more. I think Facebook is great in terms of keeping track of people, staying in touch, being in the loop and all that. But in terms of relationships, I think it's totally detrimental. Thoughts?