Thursday, March 09, 2006
Well of course YOU knew this.
Being blog-savvy can be a sexual turn-on
NESTLED among the media's meditations on the popularity of blogs is a theory that lends new meaning to "cyber sex." According to Simon Dumenco, a prominent U.S. media analyst, people read blogs --at least in part --because they "want to get laid."
In this week's Media Guy column for Advertising Age magazine, Dumenco contends that knowledge of the hippest, hottest blogs can increase hook-up opportunities and boost sexual attractiveness. He maintains some people are using niche blogs such as Gawker.com and Defamer.com to gain pop cultural insights that make them more socially desirable and ultimately more likely to get lucky.
"It's like how people used to offer or borrow cigarettes, when people smoked more -- it breaks the ice, gives you a conversational 'in,'" Dumenco said in an interview.
"Blog culture just sort of accelerates and intensifies what's always been the case: Consuming certain sorts of media, certain cultural products, can give you talking points that make you more interesting to other like-minded people who are members of various social interest groups."
Dumenco doesn't identify a direct cause-effect relationship between reading a blog and landing a lover. But he does suggest an intrinsic link between people's yearning to be part of a collective and the prospects of a sexual encounter within that collective.
For example, participants in the semi-recent fad of flash-mobbing (simultaneous assembly in a public place, doing something bizarre, then disbanding) are said by Dumenco to have "scored a talking point" that temporarily made them "conversationally more interesting, more attractive" to fellow hipsters.
He writes that the trend likely died out as a result of its "insistence on rapid dispersal, which curtailed hooking-up opportunities."
David Long, associate professor of sociology at King's University College in Edmonton, says "there are undoubtedly any number of 'desperate bloggers'" who log on in hopes of becoming "more hookupable." But he believes they're a small part of a larger trivial-pursuit subculture no longer willing to stand in supermarket lineups for tabloid gossip.
According to Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, the prevalence of this subculture is evident in a changing public discourse that reflects the use of blogs as both social and sexual flint.
-- CanWest News Service
© 2006 Winnipeg Free Press. All Rights Reserved.
NESTLED among the media's meditations on the popularity of blogs is a theory that lends new meaning to "cyber sex." According to Simon Dumenco, a prominent U.S. media analyst, people read blogs --at least in part --because they "want to get laid."
In this week's Media Guy column for Advertising Age magazine, Dumenco contends that knowledge of the hippest, hottest blogs can increase hook-up opportunities and boost sexual attractiveness. He maintains some people are using niche blogs such as Gawker.com and Defamer.com to gain pop cultural insights that make them more socially desirable and ultimately more likely to get lucky.
"It's like how people used to offer or borrow cigarettes, when people smoked more -- it breaks the ice, gives you a conversational 'in,'" Dumenco said in an interview.
"Blog culture just sort of accelerates and intensifies what's always been the case: Consuming certain sorts of media, certain cultural products, can give you talking points that make you more interesting to other like-minded people who are members of various social interest groups."
Dumenco doesn't identify a direct cause-effect relationship between reading a blog and landing a lover. But he does suggest an intrinsic link between people's yearning to be part of a collective and the prospects of a sexual encounter within that collective.
For example, participants in the semi-recent fad of flash-mobbing (simultaneous assembly in a public place, doing something bizarre, then disbanding) are said by Dumenco to have "scored a talking point" that temporarily made them "conversationally more interesting, more attractive" to fellow hipsters.
He writes that the trend likely died out as a result of its "insistence on rapid dispersal, which curtailed hooking-up opportunities."
David Long, associate professor of sociology at King's University College in Edmonton, says "there are undoubtedly any number of 'desperate bloggers'" who log on in hopes of becoming "more hookupable." But he believes they're a small part of a larger trivial-pursuit subculture no longer willing to stand in supermarket lineups for tabloid gossip.
According to Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, the prevalence of this subculture is evident in a changing public discourse that reflects the use of blogs as both social and sexual flint.
-- CanWest News Service
© 2006 Winnipeg Free Press. All Rights Reserved.
