Weddings are a timeless tradition that date back thousands of years. Certain aspects transcend their historical eras, cultures, and geographic locations, such as formal wedding wear, music, religious connections, and rings.
Now, the internet, social media, and other technological advancements are changing wedding planning in critical ways. Being a bride is thrilling in the internet era. You have the ability to share ideas, receive community input, and make decisions in ways that past generations could never even imagine.
Here is a look at some of the new ways that brides get to plan their weddings.
Specialized Wedding Websites
The act of coordinating ideas and providing coherent execution requires a wedding planner, a profession that will probably exist as long as there are still people to get married. But planning without assistance is becoming easier than ever.
Wedding websites offer helpful hints, from what colors are fashionable to how to hire a photographer, so that the happy couple can do most of the planning themselves.
Now, this doesn’t mean you won’t want a wedding planner, because they are trained at making the ideas a reality and have experience preventing catastrophic mental breakdowns, but it could help reduce costs and give more creative control to the bride.
Facebook Lets Your Friends Get Instantly Involved
In the past, if you wanted to get the input of your friends, family, or bridesmaids on a particular decision, like which flower arrangement looks best, you had to collect pictures and samples in a wedding album and present the options when everyone gathered together for a vote.
Everything about that sentence sounded primitive.
Today, we can snap a photo on our iPhone, send it as a text, and then post it on Facebook to get immediate feedback from our friends. You can judge the public response to see if people like it, before finding the next cool thing to share. There is even a convenient function that allows you to post status updates as a poll for people to vote.
As an additional fun fact, nearly 50% of brides change their Facebook status to “married” between the ceremony and reception!
Pinterest: The Internet Photo Album
If Facebook doesn’t allow enough sharing for your tastes, you can start a Pinterest account. This quickly growing social media site allows users to “pin” pictures and articles to a personalized page that is designed like a bulletin board, where other users are able to view them.
My friend Jessica is getting married in a year and utilizes Pinterest to share all of her inspiration. She has albums for floral arrangements, venue choices, color schemes, celebrity weddings, and just about any other category you could think of.
This allows me to follow her thought process, as if I was actually in her mind. I look forward to checking her Pinterest throughout the week to see what direction she is leaning towards during that period.
Future Technology?
So where will wedding planning be in the future? Could we one day have entirely virtual weddings, where guests link their brains into the computer like in The Matrix?
It is hard to say, but I imagine that mobile technology and social networking sites will continue to evolve and have an impact on the subject. Most women have their dream wedding planned out from childhood; the ability to share the creative process of that vision makes it all the more special.
