To the Editor:
Re “Cellphones, Texts and Lovers,” by David Brooks (column, Nov. 3):
According to my own experiences and observations, I would say that the social behaviors that Mr. Brooks describes in today’s world are not qualitatively any different from what went on in the past. What is different is the speed and volume with which they occur.
People have always had potential partners on “back-burners.” They have always had a “series of marketing strategies.” They have always been “enmeshed in blizzards of supply and demand signals amidst a universe of potential partners.”
And they have most certainly tried “to establish different kinds of romantic attachments with different people at the same time.”
Technology hasn’t changed the basics of human behavior. It has just given people the tools to practice the same human foibles with greater speed and less expense and to expand our social network to the entire world instead of the small neighborhoods in which we grew up.
Benjamin H. Bloom
Philadelphia, Nov. 3, 2009
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 