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Wednesday, January 24, 2007

The (Supposed) MySpace-ification of the Bubble Hottie

filed under: Bubble Hotties by Melissa Gira

The bubble — (blogging about) it’s so hot right now. As the bubble (or, hopefully, not-a-bubble) grows, so too, does the collective hotness of the web and its makers. Here Sexerati tracks the ways web development and erotic development complement and complicate one another for those profiting from the web, and for those who fuck them.

The bubble hottie is an adaptable creature. Brains and boobs both, she’s not afraid to use them, whether on a conference call or a bootycall. She knows she can escort her date from a crazy art bar to a divey little hole-in-the-wall to a full-on yuppie prowlfest and still talk a wild west web streak about which social networking service best represents each all the way.

Which is how, between pours and pawing makeouts, I was fed this bit of internets drama, or, if academia’s more your bent, autoethnographic stimulation.

Previous Sexerati Unpersonals target Consumating defied its stereotype and yielded an actual date, a true deep throat operative, so throughly in the belly of the beast I thought he might have even been a mole, sent to infiltrate. No matter, we carry on in the name of the future, and a soft mouth to kiss it with once we get there.

Now we were a bit too lush to think to note the thread at hand, but we did recieve a tip that certain elements on Consumating are raising both the ire and eyebrows of other users, perhaps earlier adopters, or perhaps just reluctant show-offs. For what is Consumating but a place to pose and flirt, and get some innocent attention for yourself with a few sweet keystrokes?

Apparently, there’s a too-far you can go, as evidenced by the outcry over the winner of last week’s “Show us your favorite teeshirt” photo contest, morgan, now the bearer of the most excellent “controversial_boobs” tag. Our inside man reports that after posting her photo, conversations began to swirl around the supposed “MySpace”-ificiation of Consumating. Smart, sexy Consumating users — or at least, some of them — had thought of themselves as that much sexier and smarter than the average MySpace user, and here were some boobs and in addition, scores of slutty thin little indie rock teeshirts, all throwing their identities, as based on a social networking site, out of well-marketed-to whack.

What to do, then, but to call the posessor of said boobs in question a ho?

“So what about MySpace is so slutty?” I asked my inside man, and, more importantly, “Is there some slut code of conduct I’ve now broken at Consumating by kissing you?”

The suspicion continues, that though Consumating users may be hooking up just as much as MySpace users — even, maybe, meeting new people to suck — that they just aren’t posting accounts of these Consumeetings back on the site. The autofeedback loop of a post-weekend bender blog post on MySpace seems to support a sort of sexual candidness that Consumating has yet to support, either as a built-in feature, or as the kind of conversation the community there can handle, fake handles aside.

The question lingers, then, on the level of UI, in the flesh and on the screen, why is it that, as hotties of the bubble age, powered by tools supposedly put there to push pleasure as never before, we’re still being asked to choose between relative and fixed widths, rounded corners and scary tables, pale blue and… pale blue? It’s not as if we’re limited by interface to just two checkboxes on our profiles these days, either “smartypants” or “whoneedspants”?

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