EDITORIAL: Like A Little ineffective dating tool, shameful fun
In the several days the flirting webside Likealittle.com has been available to CMU students, it has seen a huge amount of posts and traffic from the campus and has proven to be a great source of entertainment.
The site, little more than a combination of Twitter.com and the “Missed Connections” on Craigslist.com, has garnered considerable popularity very quickly and displays the evolution of online social media and social interaction.
More than anything else, it exemplifies the idea of social interaction and the courtship phase of a relationship as entertainment.
The site, like Craigslist’s Missed Connections, is only tenuously effective in actually helping somebody find a person they are attracted to.
If a man leaves a message for a woman on Like A Little, the woman must first be somebody who reads through the messages on the site regularly, realize it is about her, be interested, single and she then has to reply. With the amount of messages being sent to the site, if she does not see it within the first few minutes it is up, it becomes highly unlikely she will see the message even if she is looking for it.
Successfully contacting the person you intend to through Like A Little is nothing if not a longshot.
What Like A Little does have going for it, however, is that it is entertaining.
In the voyeuristic environment of social networks like Twitter and Facebook, watching other people’s personal interactions, flirtations and relationships has become a form of entertainment. Instead of watching television or playing a game, people see who is dating whom, who is attracted to whom and who is angry and for what reason.
Like A Little simply purifies and focuses on this aspect of social networking. It allows people their dubious fascination with other people they can laugh at and make fun of.
Of course, it gets even more entertaining when a connection actually does happen on the site and then people can watch it play out in front of them.
While it may not be the most effective dating or networking tool, Like A Little is here to stay.
Until the next fad website pops up.
