Her Campus Logo Her Campus Logo
lucas ludwig aRk7FZie1T4 unsplash?width=1280&height=854&fit=crop&auto=webp&dpr=4
lucas ludwig aRk7FZie1T4 unsplash?width=398&height=256&fit=crop&auto=webp&dpr=4
/ Unsplash
Wellness > Sex + Relationships

Our Generation’s Way of Flirting: LikeALittle, ISawYou, and Other Missed Love Connections Made Possible Online

Her Campus Placeholder Avatar

Almost all of our social experiences that were once awkward and uncomfortable are now seamless and straightforward thanks to the rapidly advancing capabilities of the Internet. We can use LinkedIn to network with distant family friends and intimidating alumni. We can use Facebook to virtually “request” friendships that we would have never initiated in person. We can use Twitter to casually send 140 character messages to celebrities we secretly stalk and people we shyly admire. Now that any social interaction can be carefully rehearsed and edited to our liking from the safety of our computers, it’s not surprising we’ve found a way to flirt online. And it works.  

Several colleges have taken the initiative to design anonymous flirting websites inspired by sites like Craigslist’s Missed Connections, ISawYou.com, Lovetag.org, and Bump.com:

Her Campus Placeholder Avatar
Joanna Buffum
Joanna Buffum is a senior English major and Anthropology minor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.  She is from Morristown, NJ and in the summer of 2009 she was an advertising intern for OK! Magazine and the editorial blog intern for Zagat Survey in New York City. This past summer she was an editorial intern for MTV World's music website called MTV Iggy, writing fun things like album and concert reviews for bands you have never heard of before. Her favorite books are basically anything involving fantasy fiction, especially the Harry Potter series and “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell” by Susanna Clarke. In her free time she enjoys snowboarding, playing intramural field hockey, watching House MD, and making paninis. In the spring of 2010 she studied abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark, and she misses the friendly, tall, and unusually attractive Danish people more than she can say. After college, she plans on pursuing a career in writing, but it can be anywhere from television script writing, to magazine journalism, to book publishing.