Surfing the Internet, you may stumble upon a site called Imaginary Girlfriends.com. It offers a unique service: the provision of girlfriends who are not real. These girlfriends will send gifts, chat online and exchange emails and photographs. To all appearances – and in the eyes of friends and family – they will be long distance girlfriends. In reality they are the virtual version of an escort service.
“The girls are real. The relationship is not,” boasts the site, “With an Imaginary Girlfriend, you can carry on a completely fictitious, yet authentic looking relationship with the girl of your choice.”
The idea may seem ridiculous but what it does is simply take the concept of virtual relationship to the extreme.
Hundreds maybe thousands of dating sites exist, tapping into not only the loneliness of nerds and geeks who live on the Internet, but also the desire of ordinary people of all ages to find that someone special.
When the first of these sites emerged they were seen as a last ditch solution – who wanted to meet a strange person over the Internet (who may turn out to be a weirdo/psycho/stalker) when they stood a chance to meet someone in the real world? Now it seems the answer to that question is “almost everybody”.
Sites like Match.com and Plenty of Fish are in the top 500 sites in the world according to Alexa. Social networking sites with dating and matchmaking functionality fall into the top 100. This explosion of popularity is not completely unexpected, and there are quite a few reasons a virtual relationship is not necessarily second best.
Universalisation
We constantly hear talk of how the world is a “global village”. In recent years it has become so much easier to communicate across great distances. Additionally, the people in the places we communicate with have likely been exposed to the same media, eat at the same take-out places and have similar experiences of life based around global social ideas (what globalisation expert Harvey refers to as “universalisation”) . It is no longer scary or exotic to contemplate dating someone on the other side of the planet.

Long distance relationships have always existed, but in the digital age they are much easier to maintain
Intimacy at a distance
What Giddens, another globalisation expert, points out is that “in today’s world, social relations and interaction are not dependent upon simultaneous physical ‘presence’ within a specific location.”
He calls this “time-space distanciation”. One has the ability to form a relationship with someone in a place so distant that neither of you are ever awake at the same time. Not only does modern technology enable such a relationship but such relationships are appealing because they can be slotted into one’s daily life. Virtual partners can be there when you want them to be, and disappear when you have other concerns.
Thompson, writing on media and modernity, refers to such relationships as mediated quasi-interaction, “They are regular and dependable companions who can provide entertainment, offer advice, recount events in distant locales, serve as a topic of conversation and so on – all in a way that avoids the reciprocal demands and complexities that are characteristic of relationships sustained through face-to-face interaction”.
Perfection
Another point made by Thompson is that virtual partners are malleable. The physical distance helps one shape the person according to your own wishes, feelings and desires. In actual fact is this so different from ordering a virtual girlfriend online?
How real is virtual?
Can dating sites be considered just another part of the Internet shopping phenomenon? After all, most dating sites charge a membership fee before you are free to browse around for potential partners. Or are they the solution to the fast-paced and somewhat dangerous modern world where meeting people becomes a challenge many of us don’t have time for?

In the days before computers, before the Internet, before Facebook… we had these things called diaries (or journals if you’re in the US) where one recorded one’s most intimate thoughts and opinions. Often these diaries came with a lock and key, to keep intruders out. The diary was the very epitome of privacy, to invade that was a crime almost worthy of capital punishment.
Shakespeare said that “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players”. Never has this been more true than in blogosphere where one wants to be interesting, wants to have a narrative, wants to be a main character. And this means sharing of oneself, often more than one would be comfortable with face-to-face. It also means getting involved in the narrative beyond fear of consequence.
Mobile application developer Joey Hess discovered on Wednesday that the Palm Pre – one of the most popular smartphones – sends data back to Palm. Not surprising in and of itself, but the data in question happens to be your location and your application usage… and it sends this without your permission.
You may have the image of cellular providers as the jealous x-girlfriend trying to figure out exactly what you’re doing with your time, or the evil overlord who wants to monitor his minions, but in actual fact privacy in this sense became a thing of the past long ago. Every time you use a credit or debit card, every time you make a phone call, every time you run a search on Google, information is gathered about you.
“A significant part of Israel’s defence budget goes towards weapons that minimize the loss of human lives, both Israel’s and its enemies”,
“It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead” Kyle Reese tells Sarah Conner in The Terminator.

Firstly, would limiting of freedom of speech in that case be justified? Our South African constitution says “Yes”. It excludes hate speech from that freedom. However, if this is a rule that should be applied to the Internet, who is to apply it? The ISPs (such as AT&T)? Some places in the world are 

Nimnod, a member of
even more substantial. Not only do you receive companions who are there when you need them (but don’t demand anything of you when you don’t), but all the information about the symbolic universe you happen to inhabit is at your fingertips.
Message realises that in the digital age there is a need for a change of strategy “We believe file sharing by peer-to-peer should be legalised. The sharing of music where it is not for profit is a great thing for culture and music.”*
MySpace allows users to set up Band Profiles that can include videos, gig guides, links for ordering CDs and interaction with their fans. The pages automatically start playing audio from the bands as samples which can be made available for download (for free or at the request of some donation).
You use the fans, you give them creativity, you give them free music and allow them to use your content to make promos for you. You give them the opportunity to come and see you live. You sell them new and innovative merchandise – stuff they can see and touch and show their friends.
The best way of understanding Creative Commons is as a library book. You’re
In his book, Remix, he interviews Mark Shuttleworth, a South African businessman who advocates open source – part of the sharing economy. Shuttleworth points to wikis, particularly
hybrid economy where people create and share – for free – promotional material that Hollywood would have had to spend money on creating before.
Dr Horrible may be the most famous example (especially because it includes big names such as Whedon and Neil-Patrick Harris of How I Met Your Mother fame), but it is far from the only example of this method of making money out of media.


The alternative to piracy often isn’t paying, it’s doing without. And doesn’t everyone have a right to information? It is this belief that sparked the creation of Sweden’s