“the biggest problem americans have is what cereal to buy in the cereal aisle.”
-my dad (who spent the first 56 years of his life in the USSR)
i’ve been watching my friend sarah write about her adventures in crazyblinddate land, and it’s gotten me thinking.
sarah explains:
CrazyBlindDate.com was started by the folks who brought us OkCupid — the free social networking / test-taking / dating site that’s given the pay sites like Match.com and eHarmony a run for their money. And so far, I’m impressed.
The premise is simple: you tell them a few things about yourself, who you’re looking to meet, where you’re willing to travel, and when you’re willing to do that. Meanwhile, other people are on the site doing the same thing. The Internet Brain lines you up, makes a match where requirements coincide, and asks both parties to confirm the date after showing basic information about the other person. This includes very blurry pictures of each other, as a teaser. Once you say yes, you’re committed to it.
….Why I’m excited about this site: they’re taking something that has massive screw-up potential, and handling it well.
sarah then decided to test out exactly how well this screw-up potential is indeed being handled by subjecting herself to some first-person “Field Research in Extreme Social Media Sports.”
in case you’re wondering, that crazyblinddate ended up going something like this:
and here’s where it gets interesting. despite the lame-o first foray, and despite the fact that she herself admits that, “Blind dates are inherently sketchy-sounding,” she decided to do it again!
see, what’s happened is that we all (well, most of us, anyway) seem to have ended up in some scene. ethan watters coined it as “urban tribes” in 2003, but this kind of thing has been going on for ages, really. it’s hard to escape noticing how many times the word “scene” is uttered in the course of i’m not there, todd haynes’s recent movie about the live(s) of bob dylan. evidently “folk music” was a kind of “anti the pop tastelessness” scene going on in greenwich village in the 60’s.
what’s happened since then, however, is that social network apps have come along. which, in retrospect is barely even an appropriate way to think about them because we (generally) use them to connect to people we already know rather than to random strangers. what these sites have really become are “friend management systems,” which is an important tool for the maintenance and enhancement of any social scene, if you think about it. it’s preceisely what’s great about those kinds of sites: we can now assert our place in our scene even without leaving the house. true to form, bob dylan’s myspace page has been viewed 2,983,449 times.
so what’s interesting is that crazyblinddate is the anti all of this. we’ve become so obsessed with needing to control our choices, our lives–or lifestyles, our destinies, that we’ve become insulated against chance. and despite what facebook’s aggressively chance-destroying mini-feed has to say about it, with its relentless broadcast of all the activities of all your friends all the time ever, i think, really, we LOVE chance.
it’s what makes something like last.fm so great, for instance. the possibility of an unexpected, fantastic music discovery that we do not have to actively seek out. it finds us. by chance. if there was a service that i’d say CBD offers–aside from the “matchmaking” service–it’s that deliberate creation of chance.
even though we love chance despite our neurotic compulsion to set up barriers against it, we are also simultaneously overwhelmed by the amount of choices we have to make. a few weeks ago a friend of mine took me to this famous ice cream parlor in berkeley, and the amount of choices of ice cream flavors was suddenly paralyzing. even after the samples, i really was not adequately prepared to have any idea if i wanted raspberry cheesecake flavor ice cream or apple cobbler flavor ice cream. all i wanted was ice cream.
yes, we want as many options as we can get so as to have the opportunity to find the thing that fits US the best, but sometimes having to slog our way through the trenches of the long tail is just fucking taxing. i think, horrified as we are to admit it, we kind of want something randomizing. we don’t always want to have to think about it. we want the perfect ice cream flavor to find us. by chance.
i think the creators of CBD definitely realize this. the whole site is about the sudden, emphatic, click-first-ask-questions-later push into the pool of chance:
Welcome to Crazy Blind Date! We like to keep things simple. That’s why on very short notice we can set you up on quick dates with total strangers at public places like bars and coffee shops. You’re not allowed to see their picture or even communicate. Choose your city:
when i was in NY a couple of weeks ago i heard ads for CBD on the radio, evidently it’s been featured on the monrning show too. the intention here is definitely not about being a service for a niche kind of demographic. EVERYONE likes chance in some form. that’s the point. and even while the promotion for this thing is certainly not flying below the mainstream radar, the chance inherent in the site’s service still makes it feel like you FOUND it by chance. it’s amazing that mystery as an aspect of the service can be self-fulfilling in terms of the “discovery strategy.”
the way CBD works, you don’t get to see what the person you’re meeting even looks like beyond just this blurry kind of photo:
you don’t get the option to stalk them on myspace first, you don’t get to find out anything about who their friends are. it’s the opposite of what so many social-network sites, or even dating sites offer, and i bet there’s going to be a lot more stuff coming like this. whether it’s with music, dating, or ice cream, i think we’re all looking for opportunities–and sites–that plug a “controlled randomness” feature back in.
