Noah Liebman

  • UX
  • audio
  • data
  • code

A return to girltalk?

Several friends-who-are-girls of mine have recently starting talking on Twitter about listing (the closest one can get to “friending”) each other on the online dating site OkCupid. This struck me as odd, especially as a guy, but a bit of further consideration has led me to this hypothesis:

As close ties have become weaker and fewer[1] [2] and the concept of friendship more explicitly and publicly articulated[3], I can’t help but wonder if opportunities for “girl talk” have become fewer. Girls listing their real-life girlfriends on OkCupid provides a way to articulate those ties and provide a social object[4] (the profile) around which to engage in conversation about boys and dating in general.

As not-a-girl, I can’t speak first hand to any of this, so comments/discussion are welcome.

  1. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone. 2001. ↩︎

  2. Akst, Daniel. America: Land of Loners?". In The Wilson Quarterly. Summer 2010. ↩︎

  3. Larsen, M.C. Understanding Social Networking : On Young People’s Construction and Co-construction of Identity Online. 2007. ↩︎

  4. Engeström, Jyri. Bookmarks, Babies, Barack… and other social objects. 2008. ↩︎