Oh Facebook, you saucy minx.

Social media and dating are a not so unlikely combination. Like peanut butter and bananas, it's a pairing quite palatable to some but inevitably off putting to others.

I've described to you all my own adventures in online dating; it's a wacky world of nuanced emoticons and angled, dramatically lit profile pictures. But online courtship is hardly limited dating websites. And that's a good thing, according to The Economist.

Posted yesterday on the site's Democracy in America blog was a response to David Brooks's woeful NYT op-ed which bemoaned the supposed death of traditional dating and the rise of sterile cyber-courtship.

The social networking juggernaut that is Facebook has, undoubtedly, changed the way in which we pursue the opposite sex. And admittedly, our tendency to indulge obsessive and stalker-ish behavior, a fact of which The Economist is acutely aware.

The Economist counters Brooks's assertion with the claim that the current state of online communications is "more reserved, socially ambiguous and generally Jane Austen-like" than it had been half a decade ago.

"...your internet-dating profile is now just your general online profile, and people can friend you without specifically connoting that they want to sleep with you. Mr Brooks laments: "Suitors now contact each other in an instantaneous, frictionless sphere separated from larger social institutions and commitments. People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships." The ambiguity of these relationships seems to me more like potential romantic relationships in, say, a Henry James novel, not less. As for the "frictionless" issue, back when most people moved in small social circles and a few stable institutions, maintaining contact with a prospective partner was pretty frictionless. You lived in the same small town, you knew each others' families and places of work. As society became more mobile, complex and anonymous, maintaining such contact became hard; and so the initial step of the dating process became the quest by men to persuade women to give them their phone numbers. Facebook has dramatically reduced that friction by making people less anonymous. In that sense it makes society more like an old-fashioned small town, not less."

Here, here. I agree. Sorry Brooks, but I'm definitely more in The Economist's camp on this one. At least the latter makes feel better about my own vices.

Both are definitely worth a read. What are your thoughts?

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Much thanks to the indubitably awesome Corbin Hiar of Hiar Learning for turning me on to these articles.