All's Fair in Love & Online Dating
All's Fair in Love & Online Dating
All is Fair in Love and Online Dating is a collection of stories submitted by individuals who experienced any kind of online dating and have a story to tell. Each user had to place their own submission into one of three categories; the good, the bad and the tragic. The objective of this book was to display the current interpersonal interactions this generation is familiar with and challenge the readers to see the new forms of communication used within these entries. These stories include multiple bad Tinder dates, tragic Instagram DMs or finding a husband, taking you through the ups and downs of what it is like in this generation of virtual dating.
Online dating has become the go-to for meeting people in this generation - for any type of relationship. However, this process has not been the smoothest ride for some people, despite others having found it extremely successful. Diving into months of research, trying to determine whether or not this new form of communication was degrading our interpersonal communications in real life, I discovered that the process of online dating was an outlet for people who have social anxiety and felt more comfortable reaching out and developing a relationship online.
Although this freedom and ease of speech is not always wanted and can sometimes be taken too far *insert inappropriate pick-up line*. Do these unlimited boundaries that the online world creates for its users help our face-to-face communication skills? Or does this ultimately push us towards a highly integrated and digitally influenced physical world? Unfortunately, these questions are not simply answered and can have a different effect on all individuals.
This loss for answers led me to reach out to my peers to share their stories from the online dating trenches. After receiving 47 submissions, there is still a divided opinion on online dating. Data shows that older users were more common to find a successful relationship; whereas younger users used the applications for more laid back and ‘hookup’ experiences. After telling their story, each submission then had to be classified as one of three categories; the good (19), the bad (14) and the tragic (14). Now it’s your turn to dive into these stories and develop your own opinions.
The icon for ‘the good’ is a circle, this shape reoccurs in the gutter of the spreads within this section. There is also a circle, used as an end mark, after each submission to indicate once a story ends. As seen on the spread, some pull quotes from the submissions are in a handwritten script and in the same colour as the section it is in. ‘The Bad’ is represented by two triangles facing each other. Within this section the submissions had more screenshots of virtual conversations. All of these images were transferred into the text bubbles seen in the layout. The colours of the bubbles correspond to the section they are seen in. Lastly ‘the tragic’, represented by a blue oval. This section also includes virtual messages and the script pull quotes.
