As ever, I was browsing the latest in popular technologies driving their way into my cell phone, when I was suddenly brought up short. It wasn’t a surprise that online dating had gone mobile, or with the latest in wireless tech, you could stroll into a Starbuck’s or your neighborhood saloon, and see if anyone there might be interested in you. (That’s right. Before you even work up the courage to chat up the potential target, you can check out all manner of information they’ve posted. Think of the time and aggravation saved with “Oh, no! Not another lawyer!” or the truly lucky pick-up line: “We went to the same high school!”)

While this scenario can play out every day with the niftiest instant dating services, that’s not what caught my attention. No, it was that the journalist described mobile phone dating as a successor to “traditional” computer dating. Traditional? What’s so traditional about computer dating?

I had always thought a tradition meant the time-honored passing down of rituals from generation to generation. But where are the generations here? Who can say: “My parents met on the Internet, and I met my fiancé there, as well.” Could something less than a decade old have a generation involved?

And then I recalled a conversation I recently had with the provost of recognizable university. She, with the high-powered PhD and stratospheric academic credentials, had rather snootily turned to me, and stated, “Why I met my husband on the Internet.”

I was shocked then, and I remain shocked today. Of all the 2,000 people at the reception who were milling about, she was the last person you might guess had gone trolling in cyberspace. So if the most staid and conservative among us are game for digital mate-seeking, this approach certainly could become core, and before you can say “Get out your blue book,” a tradition could be born. At least, by the time she goes looking for another husband.

And why couldn’t generations of technology be considered, instead of the twenty-odd year arc of each human generation? Which returns me to the author. What could he or she be thinking?

Say the author is in his or her twenties. In such a life, there has always been personal computers, always been the cell phone, cyberspace and laptops. If you grew up in a world where on-line dating was the norm, the word “traditional” might be entirely appropriate.

Yes, the world is changing, whether or not you or I need a date. In fact, in the US, we’re actually playing catch-up. Throughout Asia, cell phone dating services are far more popular than their Internet counterparts, in part because there are many more cell phones than pc’s.

For a big slug of the world’s younger population, all this technology isn’t new: It’s the norm. They will never know life without the Internet or global communications or any of those miraculous technical breakthroughs we’ve been witnessing for the last twenty years.

While technology will continue to emerge, I can’t help but wonder if the cellphonization of everything is, in fact, the crossing of a major frontier, and not just another way station in the greater continuum of technology. It’s my sense that the convergence of all things into tiny and ubiquitous personal devices will go down in human history as a dramatic change in how humans live their lives. Which, in turn, will generate new traditions.

But that’s only a hunch. We won’t really know for another twenty years.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.

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