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DrJohnSea41 -> RE: Sending out photos to a stranger (7/11/2004 12:33:54 PM)
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quote:
I'm not remotely interested in someone's shell, I want to know who they ARE, not what they look like.
When I'm asked if I wish to see their pics, I politely decline. I have no inner need to see them until after I feel I actually know them a little, and then - only then - do I find it nice to place a FACE to the name. Note the FACE. I care nothing for the body.
That's quite refreshing, although, as we all know, it runs counter to the attitude about 99% of all Americans. In fact, it's disturbingly interesting that numerous studies are showing that personal ads without pictures are slowly dying off. Newspapers report a severe decline in personals submissions, but personals websites in the vanilla world show a similar decline in ads without pictures. I suspect that the simultaneous trends of users becoming savvy with the technology to upload images and the well established fact that users browse ads with images much more frequently is simply pushing non-photo ads aside.
There are obviously many pros and cons to this situation, but I think there is one that isn't usually discussed because its effects are somewhat subtle. Something sociologists are beginning to discover is that "choice" turns out to be a feature in our lives that is not open ended. In other words, it turns out that having too many choices has a negative impact on the chooser just as much as having no choices does. There is presently a lot of evidence which suggests that when presented with a huge range of choices, people have a strong tendency to either make no choice at all, or have considerably less satisfaction and commitment to the choice they do make. In relation to personals, the connection should be pretty clear.
So far, it looks as if the very fact that so many people are online means that our potential "choices" are enormous and by posting images this only spreads the range of choices by the fact that it plays on our very human impulse to fall prey to simple physical attraction. In English, this means that 1) we have LOTS of people to "choose" from and 2) they range wildly from "ugly" to a "10" regardless of the fact that such a choice is subjective. Studies already show that when faced with such diversity of choice, subjects frequently report LESS satisfaction, more frustration and a general degree of happiness LOWER than subjects with much smaller sets of choices. In short, we become overwhelmed by choice and default to more primal instincts to deal with it -- we rank everything! Is it any wonder then, that we see this "tyranny of the beautiful people" where attractive people get so much more mail than unattractive ones, no matter how well written and interesting an ad may be? This isn't just "shallowness" at work -- it is as much symptomatic of the very nature of choices as it is just attraction. It turns out that people behave the same way when they look at websites of objects for sale!
My point isn't that pictures are bad. It is simply that 1) it is inevitable that if you don't show your face you'll be ignored more and more anyway and (ironically) 2) this push towards images actually marginalizes people to a GREATER extent than we saw in the days of text ads! Sort of a Catch-22 isn't it?
What can we do? No one knows yet. So far, just realizing how easily we are manipulated by choices is slow to catch on so the way to break free of the tyranny of our unconscious nature has yet to be explored.
John
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