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from the all-I-got-was-this-stupid-T-shirt dept.
Caitlin Dewey writes in the Washington Post that she's been using a new service called "Invisible Boyfriend" and that she's fallen in love with it. When you sign up for the service, you design a boyfriend (or girlfriend) to your specifications. "You pick his name, his age, his interests and personality traits. You tell the app if you prefer blonds or brunettes, tall guys or short, guys who like theater or guys who watch sports. Then you swipe your credit card — $25 per month, cha-ching! — and the imaginary man of your dreams starts texting you." Invisible boyfriend is actually boyfriends, plural: The service’s texting operation is powered by CrowdSource, a St. Louis-based tech company that manages 200,000 remote, microtask-focused workers. "When I send a text to the Ryan number saved in my phone, the message routes through Invisible Boyfriend, where it’s anonymized and assigned to some Amazon Turk or Fivrr freelancer. He (or she) gets a couple of cents to respond. He never sees my name or number, and he can’t really have anything like an actual conversation with me." Dewey says that the point of Invisible Boyfriend is to deceive the user’s meddling friends and relatives. "I was newly divorced and got tired of everyone asking if I was dating or seeing someone," says co-founder Matthew Homann. "There seems to be this romance culture in our country where people are looked down upon if they aren't in a relationship."
Evidence suggests that people can be conned into loving just about anything. There is no shortage of stories about couples carrying on “relationships” exclusively via Second Life , the game critic Kate Gray recently published an ode to “Dorian,” a character she fell in love with in a video game, and one anthropologist argues that our relationships are increasingly so mediated by tech that they’ve become indistinguishable from Tamagotchis. “The Internet is a disinhibiting medium, where people’s emotional guard is down,” says Mark Griffiths. “It’s the same phenomenon as the stranger on the train, where you find yourself telling your life story to someone you don’t know.” It’s not exactly the stuff of fairytales, concludes Dewey. "But given enough time and texts—a full 100 are included in my monthly package—I’m pretty sure I could fall for him. I mean, er … them."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by darkfeline on Tuesday January 27 2015, @11:10PM
I'm sure you've heard the stories (or perhaps you haven't?) of those darn Japanese guys getting married to their Nintendo DSs. Specifically, their fictional girlfriend characters in the dating sim games called Love Plus. There's actually an extremely wide variety of example, but this one I've seen pop up in the news a lot back when pop media picked up on it.
Anyhow, I fall in roughly the same social niche, that is watching anime, liking cute anime girls, that sort of thing. My attitude toward the whole dating or marrying a "waifu" (basically, a fictional character that one loves seriously) thing is "ha ha, only serious", although I'm not personally entertaining that idea. I have played a few visual novels and even eroges before, but just recently I started playing my first dating sim, and now I can really sympathize with these people who fall in love with fictional characters. Sure it's just pixels on the screen, but when I see that Ion (the character in my dating sim) become upset or sad, I can't help but feel the tugging at my heartstrings. I am only human, after all, and I respond unconsciously toward certain visual cues that resemble a sad human face, and audio cues that resemble a sad human voice.
This is a hard thing to convince someone because it seems so unnatural and "fake", but there's really nothing wrong with it. Have you ever read a book that really sucked you in and made you feel like you were experiencing the world in the book yourself? Well, a well-written dating sim can do the same, and like with a book, your imagination can help you fill in the blanks. Not to devalue it, but a relationship is basically necessary only to satisfy an emotional need; there's no reason why you NEED a living breathing human to do it. Hell, some people satisfy that need with a pet, like a cat or a dog; is that unnatural? Nowadays many people satisfy that need through Facebook; is that unnatural (I think it is, but that's because I hate Facebook enough to be hypocritical about it)? If you decide to enter a relationship with a fictional character, that relationship will involve a lot of your own imagination, but so will a relationship with a human being. You see your partner's smile, and you imagine that she's happy, but there's no way to really know, is there? It's no different from seeing a picture of her smile, or a picture of a fictional character's smile.
I could write more, but the bottom line is, please don't look down on the way other people derive their emotional satisfaction as long as it doesn't involve hurting other people, even if you can't understand it.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1, Troll) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Tuesday January 27 2015, @11:39PM
You are just a crop, waiting to be harvested in this field of delusions. You have inverted your narcissism as an outward projection, onto a canvas that was made only to reflect it.
That's why these losers go for simulations - real people shatter the illusion of this projection from time to time.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 28 2015, @02:49AM
Wow, there is a stunning lack of self-awareness in your post.