Have you ever felt the urge to walk up to a complete stranger in broad daylight and say something like, “Every time I see you I get a burst of happiness, would you like to have coffee with me,” or, “Your smile is gorgeous, I really want to kiss you some time”?
If you have, but haven’t acted on it, it might be for one of two reasons: you are either too shy to be so direct without the stifling beer-saturated oxygen-lacking air of Dom’s closing lovingly around you, or you think it’s not socially acceptable to be so forward in any given face-to-face situation. No one wants to be perceived as intrusive and “creepy.” It is too bad indeed, and also sad, that social norms often limit our spontaneous expressions of interest in and affection for others.
When you have the option to remain anonymous, however, things are very different, shows the sudden popularity of online flirting website LikeALittle.com. The “flirting-facilitator platform,” as founder Evan Reas calls it, was created in October 2010 by three Stanford students with similar problems (yes, just like in The Social Network, lack of game leads to innovation). “It is difficult and awkward to make that first move and we knew that first hand from seeing girls and neighbors around us and just being too shy to say hello,” Reas said in an interview for Her Campus Pomona.
The premise of LikeALitte is simple: you log on to your school’s page, choose boy/girl and hair color, enter the location where you spotted your crush and write a flirt. The post can be completely secretive or as detailed as, “You have purple glasses and are wearing a grey sweater and you are reading into the wild.” It could also be very obvious and unmistakably reveal the protagonist to his or her friends (who in the senior class has any doubts that, “Yo ginger in the shades. You is hot. Come sing at Pitzer more often,” is directed at Markham Shhh.??). After you post your expression of attraction or invitation to establish a connection, you have the option to anonymously email your flirt to the person it is directed at, assuming you know their email address.
Reas and co. were surprised at how quickly the site took off and spread to colleges and universities across the country. This semester, Pomona freshman Clara Shelton and a couple of friends contacted the founders about starting a LikeALittle page for the Claremont Colleges. “We decided that it had the potential to become a big thing here,” said Shelton, PO ’14. The 5Cs share a page because of how interconnected they are in every aspect.
Besides the fact that it allows people to say things that they otherwise wouldn’t have the guts to utter in person, the site’s best feature is that it is democratically regulated: everyone with a Claremont email account can act as a moderator and delete any post that is rude or offensive in any way. This system helps maintain the online flirting environment positive and complementary, and prevent sexist jokes and hateful comments.
Yet, LikeALittle is not completely joke-free as a lot of users target their friends in teasing posts. Reas doesn’t see them as problematic. “People generally get rid of them or realize they are jokes and don’t take them seriously,” he said. “But there are plenty of very serious posts of people actually connecting.”
If you read through a couple of pages of LikeALittle posts you will stumble upon Facebook-wall-like conversations between various users that sometimes turn into invitations for real-life encounters. The system is unbearably cute: to maintain anonymity, each new member is assigned a random fruit name, while the original author of the post is named “Author.” A typical conversation, in which everyone is on the hunt for more details, goes like this:
At Coop Store: Female, Black hair: I cant talk to you because you are a little intimidating but I can tell that you are fun to be around. Keep smiling, your random spurts of laughter while you look at your phone are cute.
Blackberry says: More details?
Pineapple says: don’t be intimidated…say hi…maybe she is waiting for u to make the first move
Orange says: What did she look like??
Strawberry says: what day does she work?
The next step is a private message or email, in which author and (fruit) crush can determine with certainty that they are, in fact, talking to the person they think they are talking to and decide what’s next. Both Reas and Shelton have heard sweeping success stories that start with “girl, brunette” and end with “and now we are in a relationship which has been amazing, exciting, and totally wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for LikeALittle” (Queen’s University). Such tales have not yet been heard at the 5Cs, but if it happened to you or anyone you know, please do tell!
For this virtual love fairytale to come true, however, one of two important conditions has to be met: a) target crush or his/her friends check LikeALittle often enough to spot the faithful post, or, b) author knows crush’s email address and the flirt is sent anonymously to the crush’s greatest amusement. If neither happens, “they probably would never know,” Shelton explained. “If that person just happens to go on when you posted something about them, and you were really specific, then something could happen. Otherwise, it’s just a fun thing for other people to read, and exciting to think that the person you’re writing about might see it, too.”
While this doesn’t sound too unrealistic at a school the size of Pomona, it shows that LikeALittle is still too young and undeveloped to achieve its main stated goal. Reas shared that the site’s developing team is working on various innovations, one of which emerged last week: an anonymous chat that, much like good old aol and icq, asks for your asl (age, sex, location) and could possibly bring about a real life encounter and connection with another student on the 5Cs.
But maybe the appeal of a site like LikeALittle is elsewhere. “I think a lot of people think it’s fun to read the posts and figure out if any of them are about them or their friends,” said Shelton. Which begs the question, is LikeALittle another venue for procrastination? Does it bank on our never-ceasing desire to waste time on the Internet and leave more or less meaningful traces of ourselves in the world wide web of constantly appearing and disappearing stars? If it does, we can’t blame it.