Упражнение 3

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Net Gain: a Pollyanna-ish view
of online personals

By Emily Nussbaum

When I first went to work at http://www.nerve.com, the online sex and culture magazine, I knew very little about the "personals" side of the site. No, I was a big editorial snob, too busy soliciting personal essays on Canadian toplessness and begging Michael Chabon for table scraps to pay much attention to the tech-heads to my left, who were beta-testing classified-ad databases. Little did I know about the real literary revolution taking place—that out of the inky duckling of the print personal ad was emerging this proud and freaky swan, the online profile.

The old-style personal ad was a solitary, faintly musty, two-line cry for help, delivered with haiku-length concision. The language was as coy as that of a real-estate ad: Rubenesque meant fat, generous meant rich patsy, artistic meant broke. Two types of daters were assumed to use these ads: the extremely lonely and those with narrowly specific sexual kinks. Before a meeting, one likely knew very little about one's date, other than the fact that he or she would be sporting a glittery beret as a signal.

Online ads, in contrast, are more informative, more frank, and judging from anecdotal evidence, much more popular.

If there's still any stigma attached to online dating, it's on its way out. Part of this is generational: Young People of Today don't view the Web as dorky (or dangerous) by nature. While everyone has heard scary stories about online romance (beware the pedophiles and married creeps!), the chiding articles, like anti-drug ads, may trigger more curiosity than caution. And then there's the sheer convenience: Where else can you make a romantic impulse-buy at 3 a.m., other than the West Side Highway?

Still, the greatest strength of the online dating sites is their playfulness—they're more like video games than premarital business spreadsheets. In a culture that seems to regard singleness as a problem to be solved, they turn the process of dating into something that can be turned on and off as easily as your computer. Some might call that trivializing. I call it progress.

www.msn.com

Unit V