If you do not meet a significant
other at the bar or church, where are you supposed to meet him or her at?
Some of my friends and I
discussed this question previously as we felt it hard to meet decent
individuals. Although we laugh and joke at apps like Tinder and online dating
websites, it is heavily becoming the norm in our culture to find our counterparts
online before actually meeting them in person.
How do we know that people online
are actually who they say they are? Scary as it can be, we don’t know for sure.
The profile each individual sets up can be presented in a manner that gives us
an assumption or perception that may be misleading. For example, Brad Paisley’s
song “Online” is about an individual setting up his life to look “cool” and basically
“entertaining” in an online platform where his true identity can remain hidden.
The problem with this—besides the fact people can outright lie—is people can
choose to only include the positive information about themselves while leaving
out negative flaws that might disturb their viewers. So while one might risk being
caught with their fake or partially fake identity, they seem to find the
outcome pleasing enough to continue hiding their true character.
This deception characters and
personality has occurred long before the internet allowed people a platform to
hide behind. Shakespeare in his cleverness, was able to disguise male actors
playing female roles that dressed as men, perhaps not to score a date or look
cool online but to get ahead in terms of gender equality. We see Rosalind transform
to Ganymede and Celia as Aliena in the play As
You Like It. In Twelfth Night, Viola
disguises herself as Cesario. Olivia ends up falling in love with
Sebastian, but clearly it is not the Sebastian she thinks it is. She ends up taking
herself to marriage because of Viola’s deception, in which she thinks she is
marrying Viola’s personality when instead she marries the actual Sebastian.
The difference today that the
online platform contains is the range and flexibility with which people can display
themselves. They are held less credible to their true identities and are harder
to track down. Even if someone posts under their own name on social media, that
person could refute that it actually happened by claiming someone else hacked
his or her account. Then, who is to blame?
At least before the power of online, people
were likely to be caught for their mischievous behavior. In Twelfth Night, Malvolio was tricked of
Olivia’s identity by Fabian and Sir Toby with the help of Maria. This prank of
acting as Olivia is revealed simply because Olivia explains to Malvolio it is
not her handwriting. If this had been typed out instead of written, the scheme
may have worked.
While the credibility of some
online dating sites and apps is not trustworthy, it may be the new avenue for
successfully finding the person one desires. It might take crawling through a
few liars or sketchy people, or perhaps a marriage to someone you really don’t know
like Olivia, but hopefully it leads to happiness like many of Shakespeare’s
marriages do at the end of his plays.
