OkStupid has several defective patterns. You can not search for dating roles outside of the traditional heterogopoly. You cannot select for a whole variety of other criteria; tattoos, Everything is phrased in a dating context with too much pressure - it is anti social.

We can imagine something different and playful.... Such as:

1) Something without words at all; where you maybe had sliders indicating things like more tattoos or less tattoos - kind of like dress up dolls; making a fetish object that is a projection of your interests. It explores the perversity of human aesthetics, mocks and ridicules the participant but in a way dissects the stresses associated with choice; liberating the participants to be expressive because they've let go of their ego.

2) Encouraging a more casual less stress out conversational tone - more about friends rather than fucking. Where you could just chat in a shared open space with each other; perhaps in a funny way perhaps in a serious way.

3) Allowing search, and allowing a wider range of personal expressiveness from the casual to the carnal. OkCupid has a tone that comes across as stilted. Perhaps this best could be accomplished by allowing one to forge multiple persona to express different character traits as separate identities.

4) Allowing for an expression of intersections rather than the self. People are often changing in response to whom they are around. There's a need for a way to reflect not what ones interests are (and to find similar matches thereof) but to find complementary interests - similar is not equal to complementary. Many of the social dating sites ask personal questions that are highly context specific and that truly fail to capture the 'wheels within wheels' that drive our deep behavior. Blake points this out in the Relationship book.

5) Federated; not a silo and not tied into an idea of secrecy. Twitter has such a huge defect in that the friends of friends are not implicitly visible; what is really desired is something vastly more social and open and anticipatory - that shows you a landscape of not personal connections but of an extended network of possible connections. Leverage Dopplr and everything else - don't be some lame little secret service in a corner.

Thoughts?

ArtMeetGeek is a recognition that geek boys should date art girls and visa versa. That each has a lot to contribute to the other. This is Paige's fundamental premise.

What I think when I hear this is the idea of a place where you don't just look for a hook-up - like say OkCupid or other sites - but rather where you can project any number of digital identities into a forum and see how they match up. You can take your eccentric traits and make small persona for them and watch and see how then mix.

Also there's the thought that people can be cupid. That you can shoot an arrow through two (or more!) hearts and see if things work out. Perhaps you could even get little prizes for being a good match maker.

Another strand of thought is that it should be a maker place; where you create and share your creations; where you show off. This is a key idea. Make people make pictures to communicate, write dirty stories, make chocolate cupcakes, dress up as samurai or pirates and take pictures of themselves, challenge people to get a picture of themselves behind a bar or being a barista or to get a tattoo or a new black dress shirt or to write an essay about something they know a lot about.

Of course the secret is that this is the net as a whole. And like Facebook; the continual fountain of energy that replenishes these forums is the fresh blood of new participants.

If the site itself is authored, edited and maintained by its membership then it becomes a reflection of itself - it becomes like Urban Honking or other sites - something that dives through itself and is more a pattern than a thing - like the images we see on television about schools of fish balling up when being pursued by whale sharks.

The point is to avoid being yet another dating site. To be not a site where you try to fit yourself into procrustean multiple choice quizzes that often completely fail to hit the true distillation of oneself. We are wheels within wheels and the true heart and true motivator of the answers that end up arriving at our lips are not so easily read by other than what we make.

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There is gender and there are gender roles.

Like all things it is a continuum and has no absolutes; but like all things it is a landscape with peaks associated with concepts here in the west like 'masculine' and 'feminine'. In India it even includes concepts that we can only perceive of as a third sex. What we attach to those peaks is culturally subjective; be it dresses, kilts, piercings, gesture, promiscuity, aggression or the like.

Gender is also entangled with so many other aspects of what it means to be human; age and ageism, maturity, power, need. But those things aside - gender by itself is a trait - and it is a trait that may be undergoing a cultural rewriting.

We've all been playing with gender roles; fags, dykes, hets, trangendered and the like have all been examining ourselves through the lens of gender for millenia.

At social gatherings, parties and even in day to day activity there have been members of these communities that either consciously or helplessly fragment and recompose features associated with traditional roles. There's a Shakespearean quality of playfulness in juxtaposing one trait against another - from the full fledged switching of gender roles - to just tweaking one historical gender trait.

But online this goes a step further. Gender roles online can be deep in the sense of indistinguishable - reaching a Ru Paul pitch of perfection. People can become deeply associated with these online genders - having sex in them - thinking of themselves as them. Online this kind of exploration may be more than just donning a mantle of a gender role but something that changes oneself.

The same can be argued for non digital spaces; but the verisimilitude is more accessible digitally; on the net nobody can tell if you're a _.

Paige asks if this deep gender play changes what we think of as gender in the real world? How pervasive real world are the effects of digital gender roles?

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