How the Internet Influenced Physical Attractiveness Preferences
We have talked about attraction psychology in many of our previous articles, and we made it very clear why people get attracted to each other. However, with the advancement of the internet and more people gaining access to the world wide web, the rules have changed significantly.
Long ago, people used to fall in love with those who live with them in the same village. A picky person might have had no problem choosing a partner between the handful of suitable ones living in the same village.
But what happens when so many options are suddenly introduced?
The more options a person has, the pickier he becomes.
One of the things the internet has done is that dramatically increased the number of options a person has. The same rules applied to villages still apply today, but it’s just the fact that the whole world is turning into one big village.
Long ago, so many people used to settle for ones they don’t really like because of the small number of options available, and while this still happens today, it doesn’t cancel the fact that almost all people have become more demanding.
How the internet made people more selective
Do you know why a child easily gets impressed by anything?
Simply because he has never seen anything before, anything he sees can inspire him.
The more people a person sees and knows, the more his beauty standards are raised, provided that he has enough self-confidence for those who have confidence issues usually settle for less than what they want.
Now, as the internet opened people’s eyes to almost everyone in the world, the competition has become very serious. A woman who has only seen 100 men in her life, who live in her village, can find some of them very attractive, but one who has seen thousands on the internet might not find the first 100 attractive anymore.
Of course, the rules of attraction haven’t changed, but it’s just the fact that people now have more space to apply the rules without sacrificing many of them.
The internet has also allowed people who have additional resources to be more popular than others. In the 1980s, if a man had a private jet, then certainly only a handful of people would have known it. Still, with the advent of the internet, millions of followers can know that fact almost instantly (and yes am referring to Dan Bilzerian).
The number of options made many people less interesting
If you are old enough to have lived in the age where television wasn’t there, you probably noticed that people were so impressed by radios. But when TVs were invented, people couldn’t believe their eyes, and radios lost their position to TVs.
Did you notice what happened when TV channels increased dramatically?
Most channels became less interesting because there was a sudden oversupply.
The same happened when the internet was new. Any site that did anything soon became popular because people found it very interesting. Remember how people thought of Myspace?
As billions of websites are available most of them became boring simply because of the oversupply. How many social networks are there now?
Hundreds? or maybe thousands, but I am sure you only use a handful of them simply because the others became boring due to the unlimited options that were suddenly introduced.
I think I made my point clear enough.