Online Dating Changes How People Meet
Without the Internet, a lot of people today may not have met or stayed in contact for this long. Before the Internet, people went to work or school to see the same people. People woke up at the same time to greet their neighbors. There are still people who do this today, but the main source of contact is through online or phone communication. This post is going to explore how the Internet has transformed our media ideology around online dating.

Dating apps like Tinder are very popular these days. The app was initially intended for people to meet other singles in their area. Its popularity increased because of the convenience of swiping left and right on pictures of people.
Online matchmaking services like eHarmony have also become popular. eHarmony has been one of the first online dating site for singles. It became popular because the site asks for information on what people are looking for and uses a computer algorithms to match its users.
Apps like Tinder have not only transformed meeting our significant others but our vocabulary. Even as I type this, eHarmony is not underlined in red, which means the computer recognizes that it is a proper word. And swiping left and right does not only mean left and right now. Left means no and right means yes. Times before Tinder, the associations with these words did not even exist.
Moving forward, eHarmony posted a blog on texting and calling. It mainly gives advice for people online dating to learn when is a good time to text or call. I find it interesting that a clinical psychologist and author (or a self proclaimed one) felt like users needed tips like this. He may have been asked to write about this but in the end, I find it odd that this was even a blog that people felt like they needed at all.
The whole blog that the author Meyers is a media ideology. There is not right or wrong answer when it comes to should we text or call the other person. Throughout the years of Internet advancement, to give someone a text tends to be a way of casual communication while calling someone on the phone is more serious.
These media ideologies usually come from a commonly shared experience like comedian Aziz Ansari’s.
Due to the lack of communication that come from texting, people start to view texting as a form of communication that is reserved for only casual talk. Because when people like Ansari ask a direct question about getting some pizza with the other person, the other person start to lag out. This leads a majority of people perceiving a phone call as more direct where the other person cannot just make up an excuse to questions like “do you want to grab some pizza?”.
So, although the Internet may be connecting more people, it can also drift people away from each other in a conversation.

