Online Dating: A History

• If something feels off, trust your gut.
• Be wary of anything asking for financial or personal information.
• Set up an anonymous email account from a widely used email service.
• Never give out your home phone, address or personal email address unless you absolutely trust the recipient.
• Drive yourself to the date (protects your address), keep an eye on your drink/food and pay half of the bill.

• Over one-third of online dating sites users have never actually gone on a date with someone they met online
• Relationships that start online are 28% more likely to end in their first year than relationships where the couples first met face-to-face.
• Couples who met online are nearly three times as likely to get divorced as couples that met face-to-face.

• 53% of Americans lie in their profiles. Women tend to post younger photos of themselves and claim to be thinner, while men tend to lie about their careers.
• Even on apps known as being for "hook up", most females are looking for a genuine match and not a fling.
• Two-thirds of online daters have gone out with someone they were matched with.
• One-third of people who have used online dating have never actually gone on a date. 

• Relationships that begin online are nearly 30% more likely to break down than ones where couples met face-to-face first.
• 20% of committed relationships began online.
• Marriages from online couples are three times as likely to end in divorce.
• 17% of couples that were married in the last year met on a dating website. 

For most of human history, there was no time for romance. Marriages were arranged by families and were a purely economic arrangement designed to promote the survival and prosperity of both extended families.

It wasn’t until the industrial age that things began to change. They didn't have to rely so heavily on family connections any more. Consequently, the economic and political components of marriage ceased to make sense.

The economic realities of the 19th century mixed with the idea from the Enlightenment about the pursuit of happiness. The result was the Age of Romanticism.

People became economically independent and love (or emotions) became valued in society. These ideals of love have been heavily promoted and marketed during the 20th century.

• In the summer of 2004, Adam Curry decided to program and develop the first podcatcher application using Apple scripts. The program was able to read through the RSS and download the audio. It would use the iTunes API to add the files to the playlist.
• George W. Bush became the first President of America to create a podcast when the RSS 2.0 feed was uploaded on the White House website.
• As more people became aware of the meaning of podcasting, the numbers continued to grow. In 2015, there were 100,000,000 searches from people across the globe.
• One year after the founding of the first podcast directory, Apple joined the ranks by setting up its directory to iTunes. Steve Jobs referenced podcasts to becoming the future of audio.
• The entry of Apple into the market increased the accessibility of podcasts all over the world.

The name podcasts were the combination of 'iPod' and 'broadcast.' The name is the result of the process of getting music into your iPod.

At first, you had to download music or audio to your computer, then move it to your iPod. The iPod needed an internet connection to function. But technology today is not the same. The development in iPhones and 4G network strength makes it easier to stream and listen to podcasts.

It is an umbrella term we use to cover for all sorts of things most people would rather not name and have no idea how to fix.
Plenty of people like to be alone. But solitude and seclusion are different from loneliness. Loneliness is a state of profound distress.

Primates need to belong to an intimate social group in order to survive; this is especially true for humans.
Separation from your group (either finding yourself alone or finding yourself among a group of people who do not know and understand you) triggers a fight-or-flight response.

Dating presents threats even in normal periods of time, not to mention during a pandemic. You never know how the person from the other side of the dating application might turn out to be, now single persons have to add to this fear also the risk of contracting the virus. Trust in humankind - that is, that your partner will thoroughly wash his or her hands - is now more important than never.

When faced with the danger of getting infected with the new virus, one might come to the conclusion that being in a relationship, which provides you with safety and the possibility to share your anxiety, might actually lead to a great feeling of comfort and less fear.

Before the Internet, dating was mostly restricted by one’s social and geographical limitations with friends of friends being the most common method of introduction. The Internet pairs couples that wouldn’t even meet otherwise.

Research also indicates that you're more likely to date someone from a different race if you're dating online, by a factor of about 7 percent. 

There's a troubling trend towards exclusive, private membership-based dating apps that only allow very rich or very popular people, essentially creating a dating bubble that socially isolates people by class.

By using less restrictive apps we have the widest possible pools of potential dates, rather than aspiring to something more exclusive, we're keeping ourselves open to more random love connections that cut across lines of race and class and everything else that divides us. We're doing our part to keep society more open, less stratified. 

Mark Regnerus provides some insights into the modern dating scene:

• A casual relationship is now preferred to a committed one.
• Sex is now a field for marketers to provide products and services.
• It takes considerably less time, effort and risk for one to get sexual gratification through online dating or porn.

Youngsters are now wary of a life-long relationship and consider it as an option.

• One-third of people who are in their twenties may never marry.
• The increase of freedom to romance has changed the definition of romance.

The Political landscapes across the globe were proving drastically wrong forecasts, with improbably wrong polling data.

The mainstream media, which is relying on social media for most of the data, was misleading because of it, and the political forecasters were not listening to what needed to be listened to.

By deriving polling data from social media and quoting trending soundbites from Twitter and Facebook, real voices that may not be trending and of any interest to politicians, lobbyists, activists or business interests are losing ground.