These days I get more people searching for 'is poking flirting?' than any other kind of Google search, due I think to this post.
Frankly I don't know and I don't care, but for anyone who really wants to decode the socio-sexual-cultural semiotics of their latest Facebook poking experience, this bloke has made an exhaustive list of possible meanings. Pick the one that makes you happiest, I suppose.
About Yoko Ono
21 hours ago
2 comments:
Poking never meant anything in particular until everyone got all hot under the collar about whether it was flirting or not. When I first joined FB I was regularly poked by all sorts of people - male, female, exes, friends, people who might conceivably be flirting and people who definitely weren't. Sadly, the only person who ever pokes me now is a pervy old bastard who has no concept of subtlety. Everyone else is too scared of being sexually inappropriate. Bleh.
Albert's probably right. And the whole controversy made me add the SuperPoke! application, so I could throw a sheep at someone rather than poke them, as throwing a sheep is hard to misconstrue as a sexual advance. (Okay, maybe not THAT hard, but still.)
I think it's interesting that people are currently dealing with various FB dissatisfactions by creating new applications for it. (Possibly the original ones were designed ambiguously on purpose, but I hesitate to assign quite that much cleverness to the result.)
Still not sure that this will do much more than prolong FB's fadstream -- but we shall see. Meanwhile, I will be throwing fish and so on.
Post a Comment