Ever fancied having a hot girlfriend who simply adores you? She’d write loving messages on your Facebook wall for all to see and tweet sweet nothings to you all day long. She’d never nag and you’d never have to deal with her issues. You’d also never actually meet her, because, er, she would live in the cloud!
Cloud Girlfriend launched today as a dating site but “thousands” had signed up already according to their site after massive pre-launch hype on social networks and blogs. According to their website before the launch, only four simple steps stood between you and “your perfect girl”:
"Step 1: Define your perfect girlfriend. Step 2: We bring her into existence. Step 3: Connect and interact with her publicly on your favorite social network. Step 4: Enjoy a public long distance relationship with your perfect girl."
In an interview with PCMag, co-founder David Fuhriman said, “The girlfriend is operated by a real girl. It is not a sex chat or pornography service.” Woah, hold on - “the girlfriend is operated”?! Can modern life get any more surreal and bizarre?
Cloud Girlfriend would’ve been the stuff of sci-fi pre-internet, but the concept of virtual characters isn’t new. In early online social games or MUD’s (Multi-User Domains) like LambdaMOO, users created virtual characters and/or bots that had sexual encounters and relationships with each other. Same in Second Life. There is a myriad of virtual girlfriend apps which are very popular – users of a popular South Korean app called Honey, It’s Me! receive four video calls and a shower of loving text messages a day from ‘Mina’, a twenty-something model, all for a daily fee of £1.26. On launch, the app attracted 80,000 downloads a day.
There seems to be an obvious demand for services like this. But in any of the above scenarios, people have an understanding that their online ‘partners’ are virtual characters. What made me feel incredulous and slightly uncomfortable about the premise of Cloud Girlfriend pre-launch was that she would have been interacting with her ‘boyfriend’ – or more accurately, ‘client’, or ‘user’ – pretending to be a real person. Well, there would have been a real person behind the account, but she would have been acting out a false relationship in an environment where people are generally believed to be having real relationships, not just with their significant others but with friends, colleagues, acquaintances, etc. It’s a kind of intimacy prostitution where no real feelings can ever be exchanged.
One of the reasons that Cloud Girlfriend couldn’t launch as a virtual girlfriend service as promised is probably due to Facebook's (and other social networking sites’) terms & conditions. Facebook specifically forbids creating fake accounts or impersonating someone else. I suppose this restriction is in place because Facebook is a commercially funded site that collects user data for advertisers, and fake accounts do not add value for them. But this rule also provides users with boundaries. We value authenticity and honesty in people because we don’t want to invest our time and emotions into something that’s not real. We feel uneasy when we can’t distinguish between real and fake, as seen in our uncanny valley reaction to robots that look or behave a bit too much like humans.
I understand that a lot of people signed up for Cloud Girlfriend for the novelty factor. They don’t really want a virtual relationship – it’s just a bit of fun. But I wonder about those people who may really want to be seen to have a relationship that doesn’t actually exist. It makes me feel sad that they wouldn’t want to go out and find a real relationship in which there is give and take, a shared understanding, and shared real life experiences. It also makes me sad that they would want to be seen to have something they haven’t got, for this must stem from insecurity and lack of time/intentions/success with real people.
More than ever, we live in public. We freely share information about ourselves, our whereabouts, our ‘relationship status’. But is this making us compare ourselves with others and more conscious of what we seemingly lack? Is this making it seem more important for some people to appear a certain way online rather than be that way in their real lives?
The boundaries between real and virtual are increasingly blurred in our culture of simulation. Some may even ask why one’s virtual self is ontologically inferior to one’s physical self. (That's a subject matter for another blog post.)
But at the end of the day, here's the real question: when you’re in trouble, feeling lonely, in need of a hug, would you be happy with a superficially loving Facebook message from a 'cloud girlfriend', or would you prefer someone real to care about you and listen to you? I know which I’d prefer.
But is 'something' really better than 'nothing' even when that 'something' isn't real?
Maybe it’s a good thing that Cloud Girlfriend didn’t launch as its original premise after all.
Cloud Girlfriend launched today as a dating site but “thousands” had signed up already according to their site after massive pre-launch hype on social networks and blogs. According to their website before the launch, only four simple steps stood between you and “your perfect girl”:
"Step 1: Define your perfect girlfriend. Step 2: We bring her into existence. Step 3: Connect and interact with her publicly on your favorite social network. Step 4: Enjoy a public long distance relationship with your perfect girl."
In an interview with PCMag, co-founder David Fuhriman said, “The girlfriend is operated by a real girl. It is not a sex chat or pornography service.” Woah, hold on - “the girlfriend is operated”?! Can modern life get any more surreal and bizarre?
Cloud Girlfriend would’ve been the stuff of sci-fi pre-internet, but the concept of virtual characters isn’t new. In early online social games or MUD’s (Multi-User Domains) like LambdaMOO, users created virtual characters and/or bots that had sexual encounters and relationships with each other. Same in Second Life. There is a myriad of virtual girlfriend apps which are very popular – users of a popular South Korean app called Honey, It’s Me! receive four video calls and a shower of loving text messages a day from ‘Mina’, a twenty-something model, all for a daily fee of £1.26. On launch, the app attracted 80,000 downloads a day.
There seems to be an obvious demand for services like this. But in any of the above scenarios, people have an understanding that their online ‘partners’ are virtual characters. What made me feel incredulous and slightly uncomfortable about the premise of Cloud Girlfriend pre-launch was that she would have been interacting with her ‘boyfriend’ – or more accurately, ‘client’, or ‘user’ – pretending to be a real person. Well, there would have been a real person behind the account, but she would have been acting out a false relationship in an environment where people are generally believed to be having real relationships, not just with their significant others but with friends, colleagues, acquaintances, etc. It’s a kind of intimacy prostitution where no real feelings can ever be exchanged.
One of the reasons that Cloud Girlfriend couldn’t launch as a virtual girlfriend service as promised is probably due to Facebook's (and other social networking sites’) terms & conditions. Facebook specifically forbids creating fake accounts or impersonating someone else. I suppose this restriction is in place because Facebook is a commercially funded site that collects user data for advertisers, and fake accounts do not add value for them. But this rule also provides users with boundaries. We value authenticity and honesty in people because we don’t want to invest our time and emotions into something that’s not real. We feel uneasy when we can’t distinguish between real and fake, as seen in our uncanny valley reaction to robots that look or behave a bit too much like humans.
I understand that a lot of people signed up for Cloud Girlfriend for the novelty factor. They don’t really want a virtual relationship – it’s just a bit of fun. But I wonder about those people who may really want to be seen to have a relationship that doesn’t actually exist. It makes me feel sad that they wouldn’t want to go out and find a real relationship in which there is give and take, a shared understanding, and shared real life experiences. It also makes me sad that they would want to be seen to have something they haven’t got, for this must stem from insecurity and lack of time/intentions/success with real people.
More than ever, we live in public. We freely share information about ourselves, our whereabouts, our ‘relationship status’. But is this making us compare ourselves with others and more conscious of what we seemingly lack? Is this making it seem more important for some people to appear a certain way online rather than be that way in their real lives?
The boundaries between real and virtual are increasingly blurred in our culture of simulation. Some may even ask why one’s virtual self is ontologically inferior to one’s physical self. (That's a subject matter for another blog post.)
But at the end of the day, here's the real question: when you’re in trouble, feeling lonely, in need of a hug, would you be happy with a superficially loving Facebook message from a 'cloud girlfriend', or would you prefer someone real to care about you and listen to you? I know which I’d prefer.
But is 'something' really better than 'nothing' even when that 'something' isn't real?
Maybe it’s a good thing that Cloud Girlfriend didn’t launch as its original premise after all.
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