Abstract
Has the kiss changed in today’s Internet age? Does kissing have the same kinds of meanings that it did in the past? Will the kiss survive? These questions will be broached briefly in this final chapter, parts of which are based on actual interviews and surveys of young people that I conducted together with various research assistants at the University of Toronto to find out what effects new dating patterns and contexts for meeting romantic partners are having on courtship rituals such as kissing. Will the physical kiss survive in an era when we can send “kiss-o-grams” electronically and when courtship can take various new forms in cyberspace? As Sheril Kirshenbaum indicates, in actual fact, the Internet has made the kiss an obsession worldwide, so much so that, virtually everyone in the global village, now practices osculation even if it was not known in traditional courtship customs.1 Surveys are consistently showing that romantic trysts now start often through online communications and that online dating has become mainstream. So too has online cheating and betrayal. In other words, today relationships play out as much in social media as they do in the real world,
The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
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Notes
Sheril Kirshenbaum, The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us (New York: Grand Central, 2011), p. 59.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotexte, 1983).
Linda M. Scott, Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism (New York: Palgrave, 2005), p. 166.
Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
Lori Andrews, I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social networks and the Death of Privacy (New York: Free Press, 2012), p. 56.
Studies of online dating and the expression of emotions in cyberspace are proliferating, indicating that the shift to cyberspace for romantic expression is now the norm. See, for example, Aaron Ben Ze’ev, Love Online: Emotions on the Internet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
and Arvid Kappas and Nicole C. Krämer (eds.), Face-to-Face Communication over the Internet: Emotions in a Web of Culture, Language, and Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Cristina Nehring, A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).
Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1948)
and Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1953).
Magnus Hirschfeld, Men and Women: The World Journey of a Sexologist (New York: AMS Press, 1933).
Bronislaw Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1927)
and Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (New York: Perennial, 1936).
Ernest Crawley, Primitive Marriage and Its System (Kila, MT: Kessinger Publications Reprint, 2005).
Susan M. Hughes, Marissa A. Harrison, and Gordon G. Gallup, Jr., “Sex Differences in Romantic Kissing among College Students: An Evolutionary Perspective,” Evolutionary Psychology 5 (2007): 612–631.
Donna Freitas, The End of Sex (New York: Basic Books, 2013).
Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (London: Fifield, 1910), p. 23.
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© 2013 Marcel Danesi
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Danesi, M. (2013). The Kiss in the Internet Age. In: The History of the Kiss!. Semiotics and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137376855_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137376855_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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