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In Thomas Hardy’s novel, Far From the Madding Crowd, Boldwood becomes entranced with Bathsheba, after, in a moment of idle fancy, she sends him a Valentine. He hardly knows her and as the narrator tells us:

The great aids to idealization in love were present here: occasional observation of her from a distance, and the absence of social intercourse with her – visual familiarity, oral strangeness. The smaller human elements were kept out of sight; the pettinesses that enter so largely into all earthly living and doing were disguised by the accident of lover and loved-one not being on visiting terms; and there was hardly awakened a thought in Boldwood that sorry household realities appertained to her, or that she, like all others, had moments of commonplace, when to be least plainly seen was to be most prettily remembered.

Hardy gives us a picture of romantic idealisation; an important part of the process of falling in love. In the psychoanalytic view of love and infatuation, we are inclined to project on to others what we most desire in ourselves. We each foster within ourselves an idealised self and look to the other to complete what we lack. For this to happen, it helps that the other person fits our ideal in some sense. However, it also helps that we don’t see too much detail; thus the other person can become a blank slate on which we write our desires. Popular sayings and songs remind us of this:

‘Love is blind’,

‘When your heart’s on fire, you must realize, smoke gets in your eyes’ ,
‘You know it’s clear that I’ve been blind, I’ve been a fool’.

Internet communication, for many, provides the ideal conditions in which to fall in love. Just enough cues about the other person to hook into our desires, not enough information to shatter the romantic illusion. Candid self disclosure becomes common as it is the only means of getting to know each other and is protected by a degree of anonymity, but it is also easy to build a picture that the other wishes to see. Indeed, as I discussed in a recent column on the psychology of deception, the distancing provided by the internet can reduce the emotional costs of deceiving others. Many are attracted to the internet as a medium for relationships for just this reason – it provides the opportunity for emotional contact without personal risk or exposure.

Face-to-face relationships move from an initial encounter in a physical location and based on physical attractiveness, to the discovery of common interests and self-disclosure. Internet relationships proceed in the opposite direction – the physical encounter comes last. For some the transition from romantic idealisation to genuine attachment happens during the course of an internet romance. For others the fantasy becomes tempered with reality as they meet for the first time. For a few the relationship endures. For many the intense feelings of the online relationship evaporate when confronted with the detailed reality of their amorata.

Rosantonietta Scramaglia interviewed fifty people who had fallen in love on the internet. She describes what they told her about the positive and negative sides of the experience:

It creates ‘mystery’, ‘the unknown’, ‘the excitement of something you’ve never experienced before’, ‘it lets you dream’. It is ‘more fun because you can discover the other person gradually’. People feel ‘the fascination of novelty’…

[but] a relationship can spring up which is, … ‘not as serious because it is easier to leave each other because you do not have to face the situation in person’, or ‘not as easy because you are going into it blind’, or a situation where ‘uncertainty’ prevails, where it is ‘impossible to be sure that the other person is really sincere’, where you have to have a blind faith in what you are told, and you risk meeting the wrong kind of people or being taken for a ride’. And, confronted with these unknowns, ‘the worse thing is that you get your expectations up’, and tend to ‘idealize the partner more’.

An increasing number of online services exist to provide opportunities for online romance. A Google search identifies nearly 8.6 million references on the net to ‘online dating’. As we have seen the internet is a medium which provides mystery and distance. As Thomas Hardy shows us, these provide a fertile medium in which love can flourish.

Is internet romance here to stay? I think I can confidently predict that it will continue to grow and make a few entrepreneurs, who have captured the right mix of mystery, distance and intimacy, very rich indeed.

Further reading

• The dating game – are you loyal? The competition among advertisers for our consumer fidelity is fierce.

About the author

Mark Fenton-O'Creevy is Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Director of Programmes and Curriculum at the OU Business School. His research includes investigations into the performance of traders in financial markets, and the reasons for resistance to change in middle management.

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Get the facts behind the big business and finance stories from around the world - and down your street.

The mission statement of Google, 'Organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful' must sound pretty ambitious to many organizations that find it difficult to organize their own information, let alone that of the rest of the world. It is estimated that the average knowledge worker spends around 10% of their working time trying to find the information within their organization that they need to do their job.

These difficulties are caused by:

• too much information, much of which is often out of date
• too little information about what is really important to the organization
• conflicting information

The time wasted in reconciling conflicting information has led to many costly investments in large data warehouses (if you don't understand the term "data warehouse", why not put it into Google?) for storing corporate information in a bid to ensure 'a single version of the truth'. However, these have often just resulted in even larger stores of out of date, irrelevant or conflicting information!

Whilst individuals using search engines such as Google to pursue their own interests may be happy to trawl through hundreds of hits to find the information they want, staff within organizations are rarely so patient. So, what should organizations do? Well, whilst technology can help, the most important factor is ensuring that the organization is collecting and maintaining the right information in the first place - after all, the most basic maxim of computer use is ‘rubbish in, rubbish out’.

Lots of organizations have recognised that information is a key asset. Many of these have sought to bring the same discipline to bear on the management of information as to their other important assets. Adhering to the five principles of information management can provide this discipline.

The five principles of information management are:

1. Ownership – all information within the organization should be assigned an owner and that owner’s name should be displayed with the information. Effective stewardship of that information should form part of the individual’s annual appraisal.


2. Identification – the owner should also be responsible for labeling or tagging the information so that it can be classified and most importantly easily retrieved by anyone seeking that information.


3. Lifecycle – as with other assets, information has a finite life. All information should therefore be reviewed at pre-agreed intervals and archived when no longer current.


4. Storage – considerations for information storage should include ease of access by relevant staff – ‘store once, use many’ being the maxim of many organizations – as well as issues of security and business continuity.


5. Audit – finally, organizations should regularly review their use of information including cost and value.

As these principles illustrate, information management is as much about people and processes as about technology.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention

Gartner Group has estimated that the digitised information stored within a typical organization has doubled every year since 2000. Effective information management can improve the information available to staff within organizations. However, given this rapid growth in volume, organizations will still need to address ‘information overload’.

One strand of my own research over the last few years has been on the systems that many organizations are adopting to address this challenge: enterprise portals. Enterprise portals seek to do what consumer portals and search engines such as Google do on the internet, that is provide easy access to a multitude of information, but within a single organization.

Enterprise portals can tailor the information presented to staff according to their interests and responsibilities. The relative ease with which other programs or applications can be integrated into enterprise portals ensures that it is not only static information that can be presented to staff. Information from applications such as customer databases, accounting systems and purchasing systems can all be presented through the portal. This feature allows staff who are unfamiliar with the underlying applications to easily access the information they need.

The future of Google: advancing on all fronts

So, the information within many organizations is in a mess. Is this of interest to Google? You bet. In addition to the many other innovations Google is currently pursuing, including internet telephony, mapping and digitising whole libraries, they are turning their attention to helping organizations access their own information. To this end they have recently developed a version of their desktop search tool, which lets individuals search the information on their own PCs in the same way they search the internet, that can easily be rolled out across an entire organization.

Secondly, whilst they already sell both hardware and software that allows organizations to deploy Google search across their own intranets, they have stated, that they are keen to develop these services further ultimately leading to systems similar to current enterprise portals.

The current success of Google has caused some commentators to question if it could even threaten the mighty Microsoft at some point in the future. If Google can build as strong a presence in the enterprise market as it has done in the consumer market, then the unthinkable seems just a bit more thinkable.

Further reading

• Managing information – you’ve got the data, but how do make the best use of it?
• Radical innovation – sometimes a new idea changes the landscape, and even well-established companies struggle to cope
• Mastering Information Management by D A Marchand and T H Davenport, published by FT Prentice Hall
• Information Rules by C Shapiro and H R Varian, published by Harvard Business School Press
• Future Perfect: Findings of an International Delphi Study of the Future of Intranets and Enterprise Portals by E M Daniel, J M Ward and P Miller, published in conjunction with the Intranet Benchmarking Forum

About the author

Elizabeth Daniel is Professor of Information Management at the Open University Business School where she undertakes research and teaching in the fields of e-business and information systems. Elizabeth also undertakes consultancy work for a number of blue chip and leading public sector organisations.

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Money Programme

Get the facts behind the big business and finance stories from around the world - and down your street.

The Money Programme ‘Filthy Rich and Female’ has brought to our notice the surprising number of female millionaires, women such as the author J K Rowling, Anita Roddick of Body Shop, and Martha Lane Fax of lastminute.com. These women have earned their money in business, often making their millions, like men, when the business they founded was floated on the stock market or sold to a large company.

But starting a business is not the only way to become rich. Women can also acquire wealth through marriage or inheritance, as the shipping heiress Christina Onassis and the Queen of England are aware. In the past, when middle and upper class women did not ‘dirty their hands’ with what was called, disparagingly, ‘trade’, inheritance was the primary means of becoming rich.

In Britain, until 1870, women’s wealth automatically passed to their husbands on marriage. If they then inherited money, that too went to their husbands. And yet, the 1871 census identified some 141,000 women of ‘rank and property’. There were also numerous wealthy women living lives of relative luxury in spas and resorts such as Bath, Brighton, Bournemouth and Cheltenham. With legislation against them, how did women acquire their wealth?

Firstly, not all women married. At that time, there were numerous ‘surplus’ or ‘redundant’ women. For example, there were 39 spinsters and 13 widows for every 48 wives in London. And this pattern was repeated in many cities. One of the most extreme cases was that of Kensington and Chelsea. In this borough, for every 1,000 single men aged between 35 and 45, there were no less than 3,660 single women in the same age group. And these single women could own property in their own right, just as men could.

The second reason why women could still be wealthy, despite the legal position prior to 1870, was due to the settlement system. This was used by fathers wanting to protect any money they gave to their daughters from passing into the hands of potentially unscrupulous sons-in-law.

A marriage settlement essentially ring-fenced the daughter’s wealth, and placed it under the control of trustees. In some cases, the married woman simply received an income from the settlement but did not make investment decisions. In others, she could influence how the money was managed. The main point, though, was that the husband could not get his hands on the money; even if his wife died before him, the money went straight to her children or back to her family if she had none.

Novels by Anthony Trollope, a chronicler of the middle and upper classes of England from 1840 to 1880, are often concerned with ‘redundant’ upper class women. For example he wrote about Lord Fawn’s seven unmarried sisters in The Eustace Diamonds and Sir Marmaduke Rowley’s eight unmarried daughters in He Knew He was Right.

For every marriage, there is also talk of a marriage settlement. In Is He Popenjoy?, Trollope chronicles the plight of a man who marries the daughter of a rich man. He is forced to live in London, against his wishes, since a London house was included in the terms and conditions of the marriage settlement. In Phineas Redux, Madame Max Goesler, a wealthy widow, marries a penniless Irish MP, Phineas Finn. The wedding is delayed six months so that a watertight settlement can be set up.

As a result, women understood money even without often a formal education. They could translate wealth into income at the drop of a hat. Lizzie Eustace, in The Eustace Diamonds, commenting on a £10,000 necklace being worn by her companion, asks her:

"How do you feel, Julia, with an estate upon your neck? Five hundred acres at twenty pounds an acre. Let us call it £500 a year."

"A fall in income could mean a calamitous drop in social status"

Women understood the importance of investing properly, since a fall in income could mean a calamitous drop in social status. They were also careful to bequeath their wealth to other women where they could.

And there is plenty of evidence of mothers encouraging their children to marry money, as did Lady Arabella in Doctor Thorne: “you MUST marry money”. Perhaps it was this need to think about money which laid the foundations for today’s canny women millionaires?

Further reading

• Penalised for caring? – taking a step off the career path to bring up a family can cause financial hardship for years ahead
• 'Frank must marry money: men, women and property in Trollope’s novels' presented at the Cork Conference on Money and Culture (May 2005) by Janette Rutterford and Josephine Maltby
• '"The Widow, the Clergyman and the Reckless": women investors in England, 1830 to 1914’ by Janette Rutterford and Josephine Maltby, in Feminist Economics, Special Issue on Women and Wealth
• 'Gentlewomanly capitalism: widows and wealth holding in England and Wales, c. 1800-1860' by David Green and Alastair Owens, in Economic History Review

About the author

Janette Rutterford is Professor of Financial Management at the OU Business School, having previously worked in corporate finance and investment. Jannette's research includes pension funds, equity valuation and investment history, in particular the history of women and wealth.