By Emily Rosen

ERosen424@aol.com

www.emilyrosen424.com

This will meander around cyber-stuff – in some of its iterations – finally landing on love. Be patient … It comes at the end. It is, after all, February.

Decadent as this may sound, I am an e-mail person, a throwback to actual letters in an actual mailbox. Ancient people like myself have a hard time keeping up with the speed of modern written communication. And truth is, it was not very long ago — you might even remember the days — when you could be fairly certain that an e-mail you sent would be received and read within about 24 hours or even sooner.

But, alas, today, if you want your e-mail to be read, you need to Facebook, (that’s become a verb) tweet, text, message (also a verb) or, God forbid, make an actual telephone call to remind the recipient to check her email. And, by then – why bother? Just repeat the content of the message on the phone. But which phone? Landline? Cell? WhatsApp? and the dozens more free phone call apps that I don’t know about. Is this all part of “You can’t be too thin or too rich” and now it’s too “cyber-social?” Or is this the definition of “excess?” Are we really in a contest to find out who has the most “friends” or a contest to label the person with the most cyber social outlets?

I really need to vent at people who “message” me on Facebook. Why can’t they simply e-mail the message to me directly? Once I go to Facebook — and please don’t encourage me to do that — I lose hours meandering all over the place, collecting information about people I mostly don’t much care about. It’s becoming a kind of voyeurism … and a local version of the famous gossip page 6 of the New York Post. Don’t you just love those baby pictures?

And finally, I will tackle the angst of finding love in cyberspace, as this is “love month.” I recently gave a workshop for people interested in writing a profile for a dating site — a kind of combination of getting to “know who you are” before knowing how to find the person you want as a companion. To the many of you who have infiltrated this segment of society, your stories are worthy of publication. Matches don’t come easily and the mismatches can be disappointing, but also hilarious.

And the number and variety of dating services seem to be increasing exponentially … and now available in several apps — Bumble, Tinder, Hinge. It won’t be long before someone will open a website as a “Cyber Navigator” to help those of us to come to these “newbies” way behind everyone else. But, sooner or later, we get there. It helps to have “kin” in their teens and early 20s.

So have fun in cyber space and come down to Earth every once in a while where love still abounds in massive doses – and I wish it to you all.