Beautifulpeople.com

"Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to cave in." – Ricky Fitts, American Beauty (1999)

The person who created the website beautifulpeople.com may have felt the same way as Ricky Fitts. And what better way to appreciate the innate and omnipresent beauty of our world (plastic bags blowing in the wind notwithstanding) than by creating an exclusive online club in which only beautiful people are allowed? Depending on your point of view, the greatest virtue of the internet - anonymity - also has the potential to be its biggest downfall. The anonymous nature of the internet is great for criminals and nerds with strange fetishes but not so great for those people whose jawlines look like they’ve been chiselled by George Clooney’s teeth. How are these beautiful people meant to get the recognition from the internet that their looks deserve when, most of the time, others can interact with them yet not even see them? Welcome to beautifulpeople.com.

Beautifulpeople.com is essentially a dating site with a twist – before becoming a member, potential inductees supply a picture and brief profile of themselves and are voted on by current members on their level of beauty with the all-encompassing and exhaustive options ranging from ‘Absolutely not’ to ‘No’ to ‘Hmm, ok’ to ‘Beautiful’. As a brief aside, the purpose of ‘absolutely not’ seems to exist solely to destroy self-esteem – surely simply ‘no’ would suffice? Anyway, the point is that only those that are ‘aesthetically blessed’ get in – a selective and exclusive process that the creators say ‘removes the first hurdle of online dating’, i.e. separating the wheat from the chaff.

Once the chaff has been unceremoniously turned away to become cowfeed, the wheat is allowed to be kneaded lovingly into a loaf of bread/full online profile and connect with other beautiful people/baked goods. I didn’t have the inclination, courage or crystal clear skin to try to set up a profile but then the inner workings of the site are probably not that interesting (no I’m not bitter, jealous or UGLY, okay?). What is interesting, however, are the implications of such a site and its philosophy of 'beauty above all else'. Who has the right to define what ‘beautiful’ is? Is it moral to rate people on their beauty? Is this sort of rating system only tolerated because it’s online? What would happen if this occurred at a physical institution?

Firstly, the site acknowledges that it is not trying to define what beauty is – that’s for the members to decide. The site defends its position by arguing that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but then having thousands of people voting on someone’s attractiveness kind of defeats that notion, don’t you think? The ‘eye of the beholder’ concept means one person making a judgement on another person and basing their decision on their own thoughts and opinions, whereas beautifulpeople.com is not individuals rating individuals but rather a group rating an individual. History has demonstrated that when a group of people congregate en masse to vote on the merits of a single person, things can sometimes go wrong. 

However, despite all that, I don’t really have a moral problem with the site because of its ‘opt in’ nature. If you’re game enough to create a profile and throw yourself at the feet of the most beautiful/potentially shallow people the internet has to offer then go right ahead. Any subsequent increase or decrease in your self-esteem is your own fault. The site clearly and unashamedly states that entry is based on physical attractiveness. This honesty is perhaps a better way to deal with our society’s inevitable preference for good-looking people rather than the underhanded way that it often happens in real life. Consider, for example, a recent case in Hobart in which a woman was turned away from a nightclub, ostensibly because she didn’t meet the dress code but fairly obviously because she wasn’t considered attractive enough (by the way, I have been admitted to said nightclub in the past, therefore definitively PROVING MY ATTRACTIVENESS). 

The Hobart case is morally troubling because while going to the club is certainly an ‘opt in’ decision for the woman, being ranked on your physical appearance by the door crew at that club is not. But imagine the outcry if the club in question categorically came out and stated that it would only allow beautiful people in, ranked by the patrons already inside the club.  Beautifulpeople.com gets some leeway in this regard because it’s online, whereas in real life the ‘beauty’ policy is always hidden behind the smoke and mirrors of ‘dress codes’ or similar. 

The leeway beautifulpeople.com receives is due to a couple of factors – the first is the ‘opt in’ clause that I mentioned above, and the fact that it exists online certainly helps, but more importantly, there is no personal interaction on the part of the members voting on the attractiveness of the inductees. Rather, the process is done anonymously through a profile picture and a mouse-click, often from the other side of the world. For both the ranker and the rankee, this is infinitely easier and less morally troubling to do than to stand face to face with someone and make a decision on the level of their attractiveness.

Having first heard of the site I expected to be appalled and outraged by the shallow and exclusive nature of it, but the more I explored the issues surrounding it I came to the conclusion that the site and its central premise is, for the most part, benign. Nobody is being forced to do anything they don’t want to, honesty and democracy are encouraged and, finally, all of us who are not ‘aesthetically blessed’ finally have an online space where we can send all the attractive people to fawn over each other while we get on with our lives.

Smart phones - smart users?

My friend hands me his sleek iPhone. “Ask it something.”

“What should I ask?”

“I don’t know, anything.”

I decide to start with an easy one. 'Who is the President of the United States?' Icons flash and a computerised voice asks me to wait a moment. In a second the display shows a bio of Barack Obama, including the date he was elected and what number President he is. Impressive, but then again an intelligent fifth grader knows who the current President is. I ask a more difficult question: 'What is the distance from the Earth to the Sun?' and am correctly answered straight away. Apparently Siri, Apple’s latest voice-recognition ‘personal assistant’ app, can answer a lot of things. It also seems to cope with questions that contain syntax that isn’t quite so straightforward for a computer. For example, instead of asking ‘Will it rain tomorrow?’ you can ask ‘Will I need an umbrella tomorrow?’ and Siri is sufficiently knowledgeable to understand that ‘umbrella’ in this instance is synonymous with ‘rain’. Siri struggles with some commands, particularly names and references to popular culture (e.g. it can tell you the radius of the Earth but struggles to name the best-selling album of all time) but the app is a testament to both human ingenuity and a nice reminder of how powerful our own brains are.

Siri is one of a number of clever applications designed for the increasingly ubiquitous smart phone. These devices have now outgrown the simple label of ‘mobile phone’, indeed in most cases they have become powerful pocket computers. The term ‘phone’ has effectively become a place-holder word for any device which can make and receive calls and text messages as well as play games and music, browse the internet, hold calendar information and a variety of other apps which ostensibly make life easier. The ability to access the internet, particularly maps, in a variety of settings and situations is a handy feature. In fact it’s hard to remember that as little as six or seven years ago such technology seemed Bond-like. Ah yes, that dark period before iPhones, BlackBerrys and Galaxies, in which cutting edge ‘phone’ technology included Snake II and the ability to compose your own monophonic ringtone. But it’s interesting to wonder: do smart phones really help us?

Consider the culture in which smart phones arose, and indeed, thrive. It’s a society of instant answers, quick gratification and constant connection. Email can easily be synced to a mobile device so that you are effectively contactable 24/7. It’s common practice now for employees to equip staff with company smart phones which can become virtual tethers to the office. Such technology is indeed impressive, but its actual benefit to society is questionable, especially considering some studies suggests that many employees find it harder to separate their work and personal lives thanks to technology making it easier to bring the office home. Smart phone technology isn't limited to office life either, and Facebook and Twitter have evolved their services to become even more mobile friendly, including the incredibly cool and/or incredibly annoying Facebook 'Check-In' feature which ensures everybody knows where you are and who you're with, even if it's "at home with the hubby lol!" Somebody has even shot an entire feature film using a (slightly modified) Nokia N8.

There is also a particularly interesting phenomenon that has surfaced which is worth examining, in which any unknown fact or tidbit that arises in conversation is unceremoniously given the Google (and now Siri) treatment:

“Did you see what happened in New Zealand…wait, who’s their Prime Minister again?”

“Hang on, I’ll check………………(awkward non-conversation point - feel free to check your own messages while the other person does their thing)………………….John Key.”

“Right, so yes, that rugby match I watched last night was in New Zealand, and the All Blacks had made two tries, and…”

Surely this is a good thing. Who wouldn’t want us to arm ourselves with correct information quickly?* It’s worth wondering, however, to what extent this phenomenon is indicative of Generation Y’s (and perhaps indeed humankind’s) penchant for always being right as opposed to our penchant for actually ‘learning’. Many conversations now will be interrupted at least once with such an occurrence, but the necessity of such is often questionable. It merely breeds the culture in which everybody always needs to be right. Smart phones are indeed handy for situations in which the correct information is vital (medical emergencies, heated pub arguments) but often we are left with an increasing number of situations in which smart phones replace human interaction as a means of conveying information. 

A particularly pertinent example happened to me at a restaurant recently: one of the menu items appeared foreign to us and, as most diners do, we endeavoured to find out exactly what it was. However, instead of asking the waiter as would have been the norm in years gone by, a dining companion promptly whipped out his iPhone to find an answer ‘instantly.’ Naturally the waiter returned at that moment, and due to his sense of humour he allowed us to wait for the iPhone to bring back the answer in 45 seconds which he could have provided in ten. Had the waiter not appeared at that moment the iPhone would indeed have won the ‘race’, but I wonder if the answer was so vital that it wasn’t worth waiting a few extra moments. The beauty of asking a waiter is that they might have a personal recommendation, or provide quirky or interesting information which only ten minutes worth of internet searching might provide. It also robs the meal of its customer-waiter interaction, which is an integral part of the dining-out experience. Of course, depending on your waiter, this might be a good thing.

The other phenomenon that smart phones have brought about is the ‘busy hands’ syndrome, in which even the smallest amount of incidental downtime (waiting for a train or a friend) is filled with tinkering around on the device. There are Facebook notifications and emails to check, text messages to write (my personal favourite is writing “I’m here” to the friend you’re meeting which is received by them exactly five seconds after you spot each other), games to play and apps to buy. Apparently we’ve concluded that just because our hands and eyes are busy with an iPhone nobody notices the fact that we’re sitting alone.  I pride myself on my pretentiousness and as such have challenged myself to not using my phone unnecessarily in incidental downtime. This means that sometimes I have to sit at a restaurant table by myself for several minutes, which is indeed a harrowing experience without the safety of the phone. I'm not exactly sure what I'm trying to achieve though, because it must be remembered that before smart phones people busied themselves with books, crosswords and newspapers which suggests that even if everybody left their phone at home we wouldn’t find ourselves in some sort of human social utopia in which everybody hugs and talks to each other on the train instead of updating their status.

I’m not a Luddite (I bet every Luddite says that), but sometimes I do pine for the days before smart phones were everywhere. Of course technology marches on and I can soon see myself wishing for the days of 2011 when the smartest thing your phone could do was talk back to you. In the future when humankind is collectively enslaved under a giant hovering iPhone that has crushed human ingenuity and creativity, please don’t say I didn’t warn you.

*Dictators and encyclopaedia shareholders are two groups that spring to mind.