The Bachelorette (ABC, 2016)
Over the past two years, major film studios, media conglomerates, and tech giants have been investing big money in the lucrative potential of “mobile” as the new wave of digital advertising takes full force. Everything from shopping to the supposed fate of your love life has gone “mobile”. Regarding today’s “dating scene”, you can choose from a diverse group of platforms like Tinder, The League, Hinge, Tastebuds, Grindr, etc. to find your future soul mate or just a “one night stand”. In addition to our many dating app profiles, we can also reference our carefully curated social media pages to efficiently play the “game” by researching a potential match. With technology readily available, it often feels as though our human experiences are a bit premeditated or calculated.
Many participate in the mobile dating scene to stay relevant, some desire an easy hookup, and others believe their probability of falling of love will increase some arbitrary percentage if they at least “put themselves out there”, but regardless of the intention, the act of “online” dating has been reduced to an interactive game of constant swiping while quickly forming a superficial opinion based on the flat representation of a digital profile.
When this season of The Bachelorette aired, my girlfriends and I had a viewing party. As all 26 of JoJo's suitors introduced themselves, I found myself poking fun at the show’s vapid nature, constantly criticizing JoJo and the contestants for their lack of authenticity. It seemed ridiculous that an individual could find true love while dating more than five men at the same exact time on the contrived stage of reality television. While my righteous rant possessed some validity, my reactions to The Bachelorette also felt grossly hypocritical as I began to realize a core similarity between this particular experience and today's dating culture—judgment.
As viewers, we are fast to critique the contestants similar to the way we judge a potential date with a manicured list of criteria like physical appearance, education, occupation etc. However it's quite evident in both real life and in TV land that this initial judgment will evolve overtime as human interaction transforms one's innocuous profile into a living breathing person. With that being said, I believe it’s important to look beyond mobile and it's rules of engagement we play by while living in the era of everything digital. Instead, I encourage you to also focus on the integrity of interaction because you never know when you could be swiping left on your soul mate or passing up the best sex of your life.