Listen to the soundtrack for this post while reading.

I’m being forced to browse online personals by the demonic duo of Peter and danah. I picked Nerve so I could look at pictures of sexy Brooklyn hipsters.

Nerve totally fails to support dating for me because I am utterly turned off by the way people are forced to present themselves. Last great book I read, favorite on-screen sex scene, the five items I can’t live without… while these questions are ostensibly designed to allow people to express something about themselves, they are really all about giving off expressions, to use Goffman’s terms. In other words, nobody in their right mind is going to truthfully write about the last book they actually thought was great. No, they’re going to carefully select the book that projects the right image, the right balance of cool and smart… it’s the same process people go through when they’re having a party and they have to decide which books to put away and which to leave out on the coffeetable.

The problem with Nerve and sites like it is that they make this fairly standard process of image maintenance utterly transparent. Moreover, there is no feedback (which is crucial to Goffman’s theories) so the really pretentious fucks can’t even realize how stupid they look. It takes me about two minutes to get so embarrased for these people that I have to close the browser. (Still, the pics aren’t bad).

I think the main problem is that these sites consist solely of conventional signals, to use Donath’s term. Conventional signals, unlike assessment signals, can be faked. If I see someone reading The Blood Oranges on a train, I may be intrigued. Assuming I can observe them actually reading the book, I can assess something about their interests. But if I see it listed on a Nerve profile, I don’t know if they just saw the movie and are trying to cop some sexy intellectual cred. In fact, I assume that this is the case, because I know that their profile is a conscious attempt to impress me, unlike the impressions given by a stranger on the train, which may be equally contrived, yet which I can convince myself are unintended.