Valentine's Day, AntiSocial Media and Lurve

For the romantically inclined:

On this Most Romantic of days, it may interest most Social Meedja types to know that even today, in our interlinked, big bandwidth, twittering blogworld, most of the "Conversation" is still about getting it on, online. When I was part of the ISP/ Web Hosting Biz the stats were something like 2/3 of all traffic was spam, 2/3 of that was secks related*, and 2/3 of the "proper traffic" was porn.

Pawn has driven the media explosion since there was media, and long before Edison invented the Pornograph. In fact, even the earliest online "Social Media" sites were not so much aimed at social intercourse, they were far more basic.

Now, is this antisocial media, or just a reflection of the human need to find Lurve?

Well, the origins of Valentine's day give a clue -

pre Christianity, the Romans engaged in an annual young man's rite of passage to the god Lupercus. The names of teenage women were placed in a box and drawn at random by adolescent men; thus, a man was assigned a woman companion, for their mutual entertainment and pleasure (often sexual), for the duration of a year, after which another lottery was staged.

Try running that as a Social Network wannabe MySpace today (Web 2.0 name Loopercs or somesuch?) and see what happens.....anyway:

Determined to put an end to this eight-hundred-year-old practice, the early church fathers sought a "lovers" saint to replace the deity Lupercus. They found a likely candidate in Valentine, a bishop who had been martyred some two hundred years earlier.

And for the romantically disinclined:

AOL Social Meedja fundi Meg Pickard also runs a line in Not Valentine's Day cards over here. Pick one of your choice for your chosen sweetheart - but be warned, you may have to return to the above sites for your jollies if you do

* in fact, if anything spam has moved more to money, punting penny stocks and loans. I guess now that Viagra is on sale at the local Boots, the need for the hard sell has softened.

Postscript - I forgot about Mobile Lurve, but GigaOm did not....