On Quantifying Humanness through 21st-century Technology

        Gary Shteyngart’s dystopian Super Sad True Love Story seems not so exploratory but more so prophetic.  I find that my own experiences with technology, Jezebel’s Sex Yelp: New App Lets Ladies Anonymously Rate and Review Hookups, and Shteyngart’s novel demonstrate a lack in truly intimate, emotional connections with others.  These types of connections take time and occur typically in person where vocal and facial expressions can show what is inevitably lost in instant, abbreviated text absent of all emotion.  What was once manually formed in real life, friendships and relationships, is now formulated through social media, which finds ways to quantify what we previously felt was immeasurable.   Today, characteristics such as popularity, humor, and attractiveness are all measured based on our amount of online “likes”, “favorites”, “followers”, and “retweets.”

        In my own experiences with technology, particularly with Facebook and Twitter, I’ve found myself defining my self-worth through external validation.  I’ve found that if my Instagram photos or Facebook statuses did not get many “likes” than I believe what I have to say is unlikeable.  I feel pressure to hang out with people in order to make it seem on social media via Instagram uploads or Tweet tags that I have a flourishing social life.  There is a saying that “if it isn’t photographed it didn’t happen,” which triggers the infinite amount of pictures taken with friends at any outing we attend, retaking the same shot with minimal pose changes in the hopes of having one be a new Facebook profile picture.  It raises the question of whether these outings become more so utilitarian, a mere means to an ends, by using these social outings as a way to appear more popular rather than appreciate the time spent with friends for what it is.

        The Sex Yelp app known as Lulu, also finds ways to quantify a person’s self-worth by having women rate the men they’ve had sexual relations with in the past.  Lulu is not “about finding a partner” but instead about “reviewing and rating conquests, lovers, whatever.”  This app correlates with as well as stimulates the rising, fast-paced hookup culture where sentimental connections with others are sacrificed for lustful yet forgettable one-night-stands.  The complexity that makes up a person’s beliefs, values, and motivations can be summed up in three-word hashtags such as “#onetrackmind” and “#totalf*ckingdickhead”.  These apps do not consider the possibility of a person to change from their “#man-slut” ways later in life.  This dehumanizes a person, to propose that the ratings of them will remain as unchanged throughout their lives as the Amazon reviews of movies or books.

        The article is reminiscent of the bar scene in Super Sad True Love Story where women rate men on a variety of areas such as looks, personality, and fertility using the apparati.  The women never exchange spoken words with any of the men, but rather size them up from a distance, researching their profiles online to make snap decisions about each man’s character and attractiveness.  Interestingly, the concept of “getting to know” a person seems to be something that occurs only after discovering enough about them online that makes them a preferred hookup, whereas previously men and women would first “get to know each other” by speaking before deciding if they wanted to pursue a relationship.