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Wednesday, January 31, 2007

The Sexerati Guide to Unpersonals, Old School Edition: LiveJournal and Make Out Club

filed under: Web Sex Index, Unpersonals by Melissa Gira

Unpersonals. You know them. You probably even have an account on one of them, complete with sassy photos, lots of comments, and a multipage friends list. And of course, you’d never, ever use that kind of site to meet someone. Or stalk someone. Right?

Of course right.

Let’s all go meet up in the year 2000, with “The Sexerati Guide to Unpersonals” taking you back to those Web 1.0 halcyon days, in this, the ‘Old School’ Edition…

Site Name: LiveJournal

Ostensible Purpose: One of the very first hosted blogging sites, having opened up in 1999, LJ began as founder Brad Fitzpatrick’s school project, and is now home to over 12 million journals. Surely some of them, if they aren’t your friends, might soon be your Friends.

What It’s Really Used For: The multiple layers of “Friends-Only” blog security, where users can specify exactly which subcliques within cliques can read their journal entries, make LJ a hotbed of sekretkeeping… and ljdrama. Locking down posts also provides the privacy required for bloggers to share their quiz results and cat photos without fear of haters.

Target Demographic: Back in the day? Anyone who wanted “to tell the story of their life, as it happened.”

Who Really Uses It: Remember that girl you met in the women’s room at the fetish party, the one in the handmade corset designed after what she thought a Harry Potter teacher might wear at a fetish party, who gave you her business card that linked to some website with userpics of her that looked like someone unfortunately gave someone a little too much homebrewed mead after the Ren Faire and let them go at the Saran Wrap and Gaussian blur? Yeah.

Good For Meeting People? Searching on Interests might connect you with someone, but who remembers that they put “fraggle rock” and “sassy magazine” in their Interests back when they signed up?

Good For Stalking People? Remember that girl… and her boy-slave, and his longterm partner, and his coven, and their IT consulting startup, and their office ferrets? Sure. All of them belonging to the same LJ communities make catching up on their co-op household gossip/polydrama/favorite 70’s British horror films all the more expedient. (And one of their ferrets keeps a totally mean haiku journal.)

Bottom line: Don’t be surprised if you’re still reading the journals of all of your ex’s on your Friends List six years after you signed up “just to try it out.”

Site Name: make out club

Ostensible Purpose: A true golden oldie, MOC was apparently started by a bunch of indie kids in Cambridge in 2000, and purports to be “an online community for people like you, a place to find old friend and new friends!”…

What It’s Really Used For: …if you can rock a detached pose with your beverage of choice in hand and/or in your obscure, deconstructed band teeshirt.

Target Demographic: Back in college when MOC opened? Anyone who thought putting a photo on a website was too much work, but having a little form to upload it with and a place to aggregate enough potential emo love interest to view it? AWESOME.

Who Really Uses It: Still? *cue crickets, humming New Order*

Good For Meeting People? Back in the day? Good for drunk-searching and drunk-mocking profiles while up too late writing papers. And if you want to actually message that guy who says his favorite thing to do is “drink red wine and dance around the room screaming the lyrics to ‘Teenage Riot’” who can blame you?

Good For Stalking People? See above. Turns out he lives down the hall, who knew?

Bottom line: What I’m supposed to say I love about dating 2.0: it’s so amazing that we have all these tools now to help us build community and really get to know one another on social networking sites by expressing ourselves. What I really want to say, after going back to MOC last night for the first time in years: You know, I don’t really need to know what everybody who’s been given a little white on-screen box to write whatever they want to in has to say.

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