| mark211 | Relationships in the future? | 2017-12-10 00:50:00 |
| mark211 | As we make our way towards Christmas, in the UK at least, the work's and/or Office Christmas party season is fast upon us. In the 70s and 80s this seemed to have consisted of booze, mistletoe, booze, Xeroxing intimate body parts, booze, and kazoos. Oh, and booze. Nowadays, management fears for the safety (not to mention the modesty) of the new generation of multi-functional full-colour copier-scanners that are more like robots than instant cameras means most office parties seems to take place not only outside of the office but up to three weeks before the day. I've even heard of - no joke here - office Christmas parties taking place in November because it was the only time that (a) everyone could be there and (b) everywhere else in town had been booked up as early as July or August by droves of efficient and forward-thinking PAs. | 2017-12-10 00:58:06 |
| mark211 | If you're wondering what all this has to do with "relationships in the future", Christmas and especially New Year's Eve are both times (again in the UK at least) where the normally pusillanimous Nigel decides to make his move on Cayla from Payroll and when Cayla from Payroll is getting ready to present herself to be moved on by Chris, the Marketing Manager and Army Reservist (with two tours of Basra under his belt) who after cycling 35 miles to work every morning insists on walking across the office floor in his lycra on the way to staff showers and who smiled at her once as he asked if she wanted the milk still when she came across him in the staff kitchen area on a tea run. | 2017-12-10 01:04:03 |
| mark211 | But all of that seems incredibly quaint and fast going out-of-date. Nowadays, Chris is likely meeting, greeting, then 'ghosting' his way through platoons of young women on Tinder; Cayla, meanwhile, is stalking Chris on Facebook using a fake account to pretend to be an Iraq war veteran called 'Paul' so that she can have online conversations with Chris during which she swoons to tales of danger and violence in hot places; and Nigel ... well, Nigel is either ensconced in a game of CoD or GTA 5 (at least when he isn't knocking one out to Grand Guignolesque scenes of debauchery over in the shadier regions of the Internet). | 2017-12-10 01:10:43 |
| mark211 | So ... over to you: what will be the likely fate of future relationships for the hapless Nigel, the frustrated Cayla, and the playboy Chris? Will they even be recognisable by 2050? Will Nigel have a robot wife and will Cayla be part of Chris's 'harem' in a polyamorous household? Or will the current liberty and openness in relations between the sexes lead into a very harsh and conservatively religious backlash? Over to you ... let us know below what you think. | 2017-12-10 01:14:15 |
| dandrew72 | Both. All. None. What will drive the evolution/devolution of intimacy is as much about what is sold to the masses as "hip" and "cool". That said, at the ripe old age of 46 I can say I've seen intimacy decline in a lot of ways during my lifetime. I remember being a young teen, chasing that very attractive girl in my third period math class, and working up the courage to a) say hi to her, b) call her from the phonebook, or c) drop a note in her locker. There was a certain art to things. Nowadays, such niceties have been blown out of the proverbial water by social media and that cute girl in third period algebra is no doubt solicited non-stop by all sorts of people interested less in intimacy and more with plain old sex. Add to this over another generation or so the effects of AI and who knows where all this goes - I suspect we'll all retreat further into our own sexual echo chambers rather than have the courage to engage each other as human beings. | 2017-12-10 07:28:08 |
| r.tornello | @dandrew, your quote: "I suspect we'll all retreat further into our own sexual echo chambers rather than have the courage to engage each other as human beings."
I take that as mental and physical masturbation? Where is the orgasmatron when we need it? | 2017-12-13 14:31:13 |
| Modelling_Mushi | @r.tornello, I think the orgasmatron is out back with the hoverboard and personal jet car. Sigh | 2017-12-14 00:27:14 |
| dandrew72 | Back in the 1990s someone had a song with the refrain "we'll make great pets". Prophetic. I suspect someday, maybe the year 4717, they'll sift through who we were and try and comprehend how our own devices became our captors. We (generationally speaking) won't realize it's happening. It will be too easy to plug into that little blinking box and experience anything, everything, all the time. | 2017-12-15 15:34:33 |
| rt | @dandrew, I never heard it .I wrote a flash story to that same theme some years ago. | 2017-12-15 16:15:26 |
