Online love is not the same as offline love

Online love is not the same as offline love. The first movie to show some sort of connectivity was War Games in 1983. So it turns out that culturally we were more concerned with war as an online activity than love, in the first place.

Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey, made in 1968, had a kind of standoff between humans and Artificial Intelligence, when the spaceship supercomputer HAL got nasty on the way to Jupiter. So it wasn't exactly about picturing your perfect date.

So then 30 years would pass before online love would get a boost in You've Got Mail, in 1998. I don't know what humans were doing until then about meeting the right person. They spoke to strangers in bars. It's so much easier to get honest online when you don't have to hear the person say 'too much information' before they walk away. They can just click you out and move on. No embarrassment.

I have a friend who thinks he doesn't look divorced and desperate when he chats online. You can't see that he doesn't know how to iron his clothes.

Whatever your take on popular culture is, it's a war out there. If the artifacts are to be believed, connectivity means disconnectivity. My advice: love art, be nice.