Like the Pakistani cabdriver in a Tom Friedman column but sexier

Marshall McLuhan’s influence on middlebrow intellectual thought reminds me of a joke I heard a stand-up comic tell once: “Y’know how much karate you can learn in a year? Just enough to get your ass kicked.” I’m assuming, of course, that pronouncements such as “the medium is the message” aren’t to be dismissed outright, an assumption it continually pains me to make, as no one has ever managed to explain anything beyond the difference between “hot” and “cool” media to me in a satisfactory fashion.

Virginia Heffernan’s “The Medium” column in the New York Times Magazine isn’t helping me any.

I’m starting to think that Internet romances, including Mark Sanford’s, are not romances between people at all. They’re affairs with the Internet. Watch people who are newly in love, especially any kind of love that requires that the participants keep stealthy and apart, and they’re all over their iPhones and Palm Pres. It’s P.D.A. with P.D.A.’s. Romance seems to have become an online multiplayer fantasy-adventure game, no less thrilling than World of Warcraft, and open to all ages. Apparently you’re never too old to relish using special screen names to send cryptic messages on secret decoder devices.

Tenuous connection to current events? Sweeping sociological proclamation that begs the holy hell out of the question? Glib wordplay that might as well come with a .wav file of a pat-on-the-back sound effect? Check, check, and check. She’s a Slate alum, all right.

I do like that last line though. A girl I met through the Onion online personals referred to it as being “like a singles bar for third-rate superheroes,” to which I responded “my superpower is uploading photos that make a 5 look like an 8,” to which she responded “aw, c’mon, you’re a six, easy.” (oh, and I eventually broke it off with her, because my other superpower is totally sucking)

A friend met me for lunch not long ago and laid a BlackBerry on the table. Throughout the meal, the friend kept a hand on it and shot it furtive glances, like a mobster watching a door. Reading upside down, I saw e-mail messages, all from the same sender, stacking up. “Do you need to look at those?” I asked.

“Nah,” was the effortfully offhand response; later, as we were leaving, I saw my friend gazing deeply into the screen.

At last I caught on. “Hey, you’re having an affair!” My friend tried to look serious and rueful but seemed frankly giggly. “Yes.”

I skipped the sanctimony. I couldn’t muster it. Anyway, my friend, who wasn’t feeling especially self-critical, said, “Isn’t this hilarious?” and handed the BlackBerry to me.

“ur so hot,” the screen read. Affair wit, I guess.

In this equation, let “not long ago”=“never.” Sorry, no way I’m buying this. First off, the NYT Style Guide requires all anecdotes involving technologically adept acquaintances to include at least one reference to how annoyingly distracted they are in social settings, so right there I’m suspicious.

I mean really. I have coworkers in their early twenties who are less inconsiderate lunch partners. If people who think collegehumor.com is funny can put their damn phones on vibrate for 45 minutes, surely Heffernan needn’t degrade herself by putting up with this sort of nonsense.

And “ur so hot?” Seriously? Your friend is having an affair with a captioned jpeg of Rielle Hunter lifted from LOLhomewreckers?

Epistolary romance seems to have existed as long as romance itself. But letters — the ink-on-paper kind, the kind Byron and Anaïs Nin wrote — had a dense materiality, with handwriting that always suggested the beloved’s hand and thus her body.

Right, because the medium is the m… wait, it suggested what? Yeah, when someone I wanna bang types me a letter I don’t think about her body at all.

I can’t believe we’re still wondering what internet romance means. I’m reminded of another joke, one by Todd Barry, talking about people who complain about the synthetic feel of air conditioning: “Yeah, it’s only the obvious solution to a problem.”  I’m not saying it doesn’t have its own set of pitfalls, mind; I’ve sworn off it for the time being, though I’ll allow that my reasoning’s a bit particular. See, my problem is, I’m too good at it. I can’t figure out how not to be way better on paper than in real life, and though the women I’ve met have generally been willing to adjust their expectations downward, the unspoken subtext of far too many initial dates has been “so the first draft of you is a bit of a dipshit, then.”

But I’m getting bogged down in one specific aspect of this, and Heffernan’s focus is on the internet as a tool to aid trysts rather than initiate them, so back to you, shitty-mannered-friend-having lady:

As the flush on my friend’s face and Sanford’s schoolboy exuberance suggest, rapid e-mail can be plenty exciting. People in middle age, who didn’t grow up on texting and e-mailing, are probably especially vulnerable to its speedy high. But if we decide that it’s not quite worth it to overthrow families and careers for the intoxications of the Internet, we might consult not marriage manuals or heartbroken essayists but actual young people.

Personally, I can’t imagine consulting young people on any matter aside from whether or not they could maybe shut the fuck up while I’m trying to watch the movie, but never mind that. I didn’t bother reproducing a passage about how these things went down differently in the days of telephonic cuckolding, but even ceding the point, I fail to see how “the internet” in the above passage differs substantially from, in the words of Chris Rock (and Heffernan’s friend’s gender is left undefined, so I’m using this term metaphorically), “new pussy.”

This is all leaving aside the weird tendency of urban writers to use infidelity as something that adds a dash of color to a story rather than hardcore emotional ordnance. I’m hardly a moral scold—-hell, I think cheating probably saves as many relationships as it ends—-but what is that? I thought us coastal libs only bought into that Sodom-on-the-Hudson stuff ironically.

Let the record show I’m pro-faithfulness. Now where’s that .wav file?

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