This proposal has been cross-posted from the original at Nerd Acumen.  It has been updated to more accurately reflect the final examination.

Entertainment within new media is probably my central mental focus – I’m sure that I think about it in one form or another on a daily basis, because I enjoy storytelling, comedy, the cinematic arts, narratology, and all things related to them. Although I am often blogging (and almost always for a class) about sundry digital media topics, and will continue to do so, I feel that for my term project in my Evolution and Trends in Digital Media Technologies course I need to steer clear of the subject of entertainment this time. I need to challenge myself, particularly as a budding scholar wannabe, and dive in to subject matter, while still fascinating to me, that I do not have a clear-cut understanding of, from an analytical and evolutionary perspective. The idea that came to mind was on-line dating systems (Note: I would later discover I really needed to look at Electronic Dating in whole). You know what I’m talking about, and it’s got nothing to do with the calendar.

Dating is an important subject to me as a single man, and I have had some exposure to on-line dating at least in tangential ways through social media, so why not tackle just what electronic dating has become in our digital media landscape. Borrowing from Winston (see Annotations), I feel that electronic dating appears to have filled some sort of supervening social necessity, or has become one, in the social sphere of the modern world today. I suppose I would like to get to the bottom of the issue and cover a history of the phenomenon, the technology behind it, and where it seems to be going, and so on and so forth. Below are some references that I found initially that seem to indicate that the subject of on-line dating specifically is being taken seriously in certain academic circles. So, I think I’m on the right path. Thoughts?

Now, the lucky thing for me is the other course I am taking this quarter is Hanson Hosein’s storytelling class, so readers will find a plethora of entertainment-related content (at Nerd Acumen) while this the study of electronic dating progresses. And, well, the subject of electronic dating, I am sure, can be very entertaining in and of itself. So, lucky for everyone!

Some Initial Sources For My Research

Mahfouz, A. Y., Philaretou, A. G., & Theocharous, A. (2008). Virtual social interactions: Evolutionary, social psychological and technological perspectives. Computers in Human Behavior, 24(6), 3014-3026. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2008.05.008 (Note: was not used in final project).

Lenton, A. P., Fasolo, B., & Todd, P. M. (2008). “Shopping” for a Mate: Expected versus Experienced Preferences in Online Mate Choice. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. 51 (2), 169.