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Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Bubble Hotties: Scheduling Life and Love While Holding a Blackberry

filed under: Dating 2.0, Web Sex Index, Bubble Hotties by Lux Nightmare

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.

I’m a busy person.

Most days I wake up, go to my computer, check my email, write or code or fix something that has broken, go to my real job (where I sometimes do work on other projects, in my downtime or on my lunch break), then go home and do more work.

My “free time” is often devoted to whatever work I can squeeze in. Or going to networking events, or (occasionally) attempting to have a social life.

I’m a busy person, and I’m attracted to busy people. It’s only natural. Unfortunately, busy + busy doesn’t always make for the easiest of scheduling — and it can sometimes get in the way of getting to know someone (even someone you really like).

The whole dot-com revolution, the whole tech age, is built on the back of things like email, cell phones, laptops: things that allow us to do to be in touch anywhere, at any time. Things that heighten our productivity by increasing our availability, by making so many things a wherever, whenever, activity.

And of course, there are many ways in which is this is a boon to a budding relationship. The ability to IM, to text, to cam chat — to be together even when you’re not — can provide a much needed sense of closeness.

But on the other hand, an increasing ability to do work whenever, wherever, leads to an increasing expectation that we’ll be working all the time. The end of “office hours” is partly a freeing thing (we can work whenever we want!) but also a new kind of prison (we have to work all the time!).

I’ve had dates end prematurely because someone’s Blackberry alerted them to a crisis that needed to be addressed right that minute. I’ve had boyfriends pull out their laptops while lying in my bed, because a pager alerted them that a server was having issues. And on the one hand, I love this: love that I get access to people who are this driven, this needed; that these people are willing to give me their time.

But on the other hand, there’s a small part of me that knows that this is how it is, that this is how it will always be: that the price we pay for success in a world of instant, constant access is the sacrifice of some privacy, some time for ourselves, some intimacy.

And I love my techonology: but every step forward necessitates some kind of loss, and sometimes I pine a little for the things we ultimately give up.

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