RNDP 6: MySpace

Two years ago, a blogger named Nurble in a posting titled myspace told us about what he'd initially thought was a new dating paradigm, but turned out to be shameless self-promotion:

...some girl started chatting me up at a bar last night. She didn't actually seem interested, she seemed to just be killing time, so we talked for two or three minutes, then she asked if I was on myspace.

"Interesting," I thought, "is this the new paradigm for the 21st century? No more phone numbers and Swingers-esque waiting x number of days to call and sweating it out?" Maybe we can start giving out our names and email addresses and account names instead of just shooting in the dark.

We can admit what everybody already knows, that the first thing most of us with computers do when we get enough information is run straight to google and try and dig up some juicy info. How fascinating it would be if the new thing was "give me your name, assume I'm going to go home and read everything you've got scattered around the internet, and after that, we'll see."

Interesting indeed. Unfortunately this girl was not on the avant-garde of a new dating paradigm, she was just some actress who had 1100 friends and a poorly designed page full of headshots and pictures of her with celebrities. Booooo.

Unfortunately, this posting in which Nurble revealed himself to be that rare combination of fieldworker and theoretician did not live up to its promise. Nurble rarely commented on dating following this post. We know he was concerned about finding a date for the 2006 Emmy Awards and he found one. In July, 2006 he posted a bit of dialogue that may have been a transcription of an actual exchange from a date:

INTERIOR, NIGHT Guy: Are you going to take your contacts out? Girl: I was thinking about it, why? Guy: Well, if you're going to, then I probably shouldn't. Otherwise we might find ourselves in the worlds sexiest game of Marco Polo. ...and, scene.

In September of 2006 he revealed that he sent a copy of What's Your Number by Ian Pooley to a woman and it "didn't really work out..." but this could have been at anytime before this. We know that he later had a beautiful girlfriend lying in his bed while he was blogging about songs. And now he is moving to New York with his beautiful girlfriend. The same beautiful girlfriend? Perhaps.

4d Analysis: This fieldwork gives us more questions:

• Was Nurble too hasty to dismiss this as a new dating paradigm?
• What if her Myspace pages had revealed them to be more compatible? Say if he also had 1100 friends (instead of 12) and some of them were famous? Or if her page revealed her to be a shy but thoughtful artist?
• Or was his sense that she was just killing time all that he needed in order to know that she had no future in his life?

Bonus: Here is a Nurble Posting that Aggie will like.

On Questions:

"...questions are more important than answers in shaping the future of science."
- Donald Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief, Science Magazine

To be able to ask a question clearly is two-thirds of the way to getting it answered
- John Ruskin

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers
- Voltaire

The important thing is not to stop questioning.
- Albert Einstein