Seen

Swipe Left for Ghosts

Graphic Morag Rahn-Campbell

Ghosting (noun): a modern dating dilemma in which one person suddenly ceases contact with another, with no explanation of why – Karley Sciortino from her column “Breathless: To Ghost or Not to Ghost?”

Being a millennial is an exciting, sometimes ridiculous experience. Before potentially meeting a girl he secretly adored, Friend X was the subject of an intensive digital makeover.
Facebook profile re-vampage isn’t Friend Y’s area of expertise, but he declared a Facebook state of emergency and searched in desperation for an appropriate profile photo for Friend X.

When so much of our communication is done via screen, it’s silly and unrealistic to pretend your digital persona doesn’t matter.

This isn’t always a bad thing: seeing a post related to someone’s interests can make it easier to bond IRL, and spreading ideas through the internet tubes can have significant social impact.

However, the flip side of making it so easy to sustain digital relationships at a physical distance is the heightened ease with which we can break them off.

After entering into a few fledgling non-exclusive trysts, several times I’ve gone through the full five stages of ghosting grief, convinced the person I was waiting for would never contact me again, only to feel ridiculous several hours later when an explanatory message pings.

Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat: never have we had so many ways to hit someone up. Never before has it been so confusing.

If a message has been delivered but not opened, does it mean the recipient never wants to see me again, or have they just forgotten to respond?

Outside the formality of a pager or answering machine, we’re left fumbling to make our own rules. Sometimes I peruse 18th century etiquette books in a state of fond and jealous nostalgia, pining for a time when rules were set in stone and a calling card didn’t have ten possible interpretations.

Then I remember how lucky I am not to be a housewife.

The growing fragility of net-heavy interpersonal relations mirrors the increasingly dystopian state of post-industrial capitalism, which made swiping right on 30 people a minute possible in the first place.

Perhaps with a social and political revolution there would be a cultural shift, the re-establishment of a social state and collective ownership of the means of production, in turn sparking real and physical bonds of solidarity between people and eliminating the need for superficial intimacy.

Would a communist revolution do away with the simultaneously antiquated and techno-dystopian fragility of a Tinder date?

Who knows. In the meantime, I’m back to analyzing their Snapchat story, looking for signs of their innermost self.