You've Got Mail, but no Male. Sorry.

Earlier this year I was briefed on a project my Media24 Digital to come up with a concept for a website that would serve as the South African equivalent of MySpace.com. If you don’t know what that is, you’ve apparently been living under a rock for a while! (At least that’s what they told me when I shrugged at the first mention of the site). It’s a site where people create profiles and make friends. It’s a huge phenomenon. The site, apparently, gets more hits per day than Google and was recently sold to Time Warner for a pretty penny.

As part of our research, yours truly, fearless explorer of all things cyber, set about creating a profile and interacting so as to ‘level with my consumer’. I hooked up with loads of old mates from high school in the States and made a few new buddies too. One of whom I met in the flesh, but nothing ever came of it.

These sorts of sites are however still exceptionally popular. One that seems to have slipped under the MySpace.com radar is of course Gaydar. Often dismissed as a forum for perverts to solicit sex with all the efficiency of new-age technology, the site tends to go without the credit it deserves. It was actually started by two South African chaps, in London I think. Anyway, it’s expanded globally with loads of regular users.

So, again when a good friend and I were moaning about our lack of a wider gay social circle and the calibre of man we found in the local clubs, we decided to take it upon ourselves to explore the online scene. We’ve both created profiles and have had some success in meeting some pretty decent guys.

On paper, it all makes sense. Use the technology to weed out all the people you know you won't like, and then see what you can do with the rest! And sometimes it seems to work. You strike up a little chat; maybe you MSN one evening or even start an email correspondence. But what happens when you actually meet?

More than ever before, these two exercises have made me value actual interpersonal interaction. It seems you can email someone online and when you meet in person there’s just no chemistry (even when the intentions are purely platonic). It’s interesting how big a deal that personal contact is, despite the fact that so much of the communication that we do isn’t face-to-face.

Dashed are the hopes of the fairytale ending Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan found in “You’ve got mail”. As ‘Joe’ Says in the movie: “I must warn you that when you finally have the pleasure of saying the thing you mean to say at the moment you mean to say it, remorse inevitably follows. Do you think we should meet?” Who knows...