To browse Academia. Online interactions are a recent setting for intimacy and courtship since the introduction of new media of communication in the s. Omani youth constantly uses this medium, particularly for dating. It brings a reformulation of gender interactions, reworks outlines of self-presentation, romantic expression and seduction practices in a global interrogation of intimacy.
It is entangled with the material sphere by the reproduction of similar norms and behaviors, but also when these relations try to emerge on the physical surface, which marriage appears as a conclusive point in a progressive relation with love. Social media creates new virtual public spaces where young women and men living in socially conservative non-Western societies can communicate in order to meet and engage in forbidden intimacies.
In this essay, using survey data on thousands of Facebook users from Muslim-majority countries, we look at the relationship between romance in public physical spaces and cyberspaces. To what extent do Facebook users make use of the Internet to pursue romance? And what are the attributes of individuals who use it in this way? According to Luhmann's lesson, love is not a sentiment but a code which has rules through which it is possible to express or deny feelings.
To outline the new features it becomes relevant to take into consideration the way the web has changed our being together, so if internet cannot be separated from our daily activities or let's say it is integrated with them Wellman and Haythornthwaite if it has modified our way of being together and the relationships in which individuals get involved and live, one may then ask how it has changed the conception of love and its semantics.
Besides sites to find a partner are already widespread and well used. What does love become in these social networking sites? How is it lived? To answer these research questions we took as a sample profiles of users subscribing to dating sites.
