Stranger than Fiction Part 7

Some years ago there was a huge flap online about high school students using a series of the gel bracelets then popular with kids of that age to signal things like whether the wearer was sexually active, was looking for a partner, was not looking for a partner, or had just finished up with their tenth (or whatever number it happened to be) partner and was looking for the next one. There was a lot of scandal, a lot of people pointing fingers at one another and screaming, and all of it seemed to completely miss the fact that high school students have been doing all of these things for generations and will almost certainly continue doing them regardless of whether or not bands of silicone-rubber gel are available to signal their intentions or keep score. It does seem a bit surreal, though, that someone has apparently created a product for young adults that does exactly what those long-vanished gel bands were alleged to do…

You can pick up the original story from the Time Magazine news feed if you want to , but the basic idea is that a company calling itself MY Single World is marking a silicone wristband that is supposed to indicate that the wearer is single – and presumably, that they are looking to do something about that condition, given that they are advertising this condition to anyone who would care to look. The inventors claim that once this product achieves wide acceptance it would make Internet dating sites obsolete, eliminate the need for singles bars or speed dating events, and finally allow single people to quickly and easily form new relationships just by identifying others who have chosen to purchase the same product…

Critics of the idea point out that unless everyone in the world knows what these wristbands mean they won’t have any significance – and that this will be difficult, given the number of silicone wristband products already on the market. A much more immediate point is that a lot of people don’t especially want to go around advertising their status as available (and possibly vulnerable); we should also note that even if you do want to attract the attention of other singles you may not want the attention of every one of them, regardless of a compatible age, gender, attractiveness or other status. Conversely, many people who lacked the nerve to approach someone they find attractive for fear of being painfully rejected will not take any comfort in the fact that the object of their desire is wearing a wristband indicating that he or she wants to meet new people. That is, just because a given person is signaling a willingness to meet new people, that still does not mean that he or she wants to meet you in particular…

Personally, I thought this was the stupidest idea I had heard involving a silicone rubber wristband since the introduction of anti-bullying wristbands in the UK (kids who wear them keep being beaten up by bullies and having their wristbands stolen, you see). It’s certainly one of the silliest concepts I’ve seen for a consumer product in a number of years now. But if experience has taught me anything, it’s that I don’t really know what the next fad is going to be, or where it is going to come from. I thought pogs, Cabbage Patch dolls and Beanie Babies were all stupid ideas when they first came out, and those all seem to have generated a fair amount of profit for somebody. The same could be said for any number of clothing, hairstyle or musical choices that have emerged over the last twenty years (all of them sold, and I wouldn’t have put money into any of them)…

So you tell me; will the MY Single Band catch on? If it does, how will the company deal with the inevitable knock-off versions? For that matter, how will the company deal with the inevitable lawsuits when somebody wearing their product is assaulted, either for rejecting the wrong person, or as a result of going home with the wrong person? I still think it’s a silly idea – but I’ve been wrong before…