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Look at me They were sitting opposite each other on the train, they obviously barely knew each other. Both in their early 20s, as the journey wore on they got to know each other a bit better. That is, he talked and she listened. Not really what I would consider flirting. He engaged in a display of verbal swaggering, eventually noticing that it might be time to let her say something as well.

He didn't say: What about you? What do you do? No, he asked: "Are you on the Social Web?" She gave him the nickname that she uses in her online profile, to chat and mess around, with hobbies, pets, dance style etc. BIBI 1995. Now he was really intrigued: "I'll check you out tonight then, if that's ok." He didn't mean her, he meant her online profile.

Terrible, I hear the realist faction cry: the guy has his Bibi 1995 within his grasp, real and in the flesh, in a cute little summer dress. The idiot doesn't even ask her where she's getting off, the least I would have expected, he could've said he was going there too. But he doesn't even think about getting off the train with her and inviting her for a drink. He couldn't care less about the physical Bibi, he just wants to see her web profile. Which once again shows that this digital rubbish is robbing young people of their sense of reality, destroying their sensuality, ruining passion.

This made me think of a joke from the era of analogue photos: A mother is waiting at the traffic lights with a pushchair. A passerby bends down to look at the child, captivated: "What a beautiful baby you have there!" The mother replies: "Oh, that's nothing, you should see his photo."

The photo and the web profile. Both manufactured, the photo in case of an emergency, the profile as a self portrait. You might call that artificial, but there is an element of truth in both of them that is rarely fully uncovered, especially on the train in the evening, when you're tired: the idea that I have of myself. What I could be like if the circumstances were more favourable. Photo and web profile as an ideal: look at me, this is what I'm like when I am the person that I think is great.
Was the idiot on the train not really an amorous bumbler after all? Does he want to go on the Social Web to see what his Bibi is like online? To meet her ideal image of herself? The clever art of seduction. Just a bit too theoretical. In practice, seduction works somewhat differently: it's all about awakening a longing that Bibi is not even aware of yet, that is not even on her wish list; dreams that lie dormant behind the image she has created of herself. You can develop a real nose for these things on the Internet. But it's the real world that proves whether or not it can pick up a good scent. Face to face.

Ludwig Hasler