So Valentine`s Day has come and gone, with its inevitable flood of smileys, picture messages, SMS love notes and online e-cards and flowers.
Just as it is at other times - like Christmas Day and New Year`s Eve - the airwaves were no doubt jammed with electronically-driven messages of devotion and desire, as lovers and dreamers expressed their feelings to those they hold dear.
Except, of course, in the case of a young Malaysian couple, whose two-month-old marriage was nearly wrecked by a message sent to the wrong number.
The message, which was sent to the husband and read: "Darling, I really miss you, always thinking of you even when you are not here tonight beside me in the bed. I am waiting, lots of kisses and hugs - Jane", led to the man`s wife threatening divorce for his infidelity.
Fortunately for him, he was able to track down the sender of the message and prove that she was trying to text her husband and had simply pressed the wrong number.
But it is examples like these that make you worry where technology is going and just how much trouble something that is actually designed to help mankind may end up causing instead.
After all, this is not an isolated incident. There have already been cases recorded of men playing a version of the old "badger" game, where they meet women in an Internet chat room, build up an online relationship, profess their love and then con the women into handing over their life savings.
Late last year a "professional Internet lover" was arrested in China, after he had conned several women out of large sums of money by pretending to be a good-looking, young university graduate.
He was, in fact, an older, unemployed man who sent photos of good-looking men that he sourced on the Net through to his victims, who promptly fell in love with what they saw and gave him money every time he asked.
And while I will readily admit that current technology does have its own romantic uses, I fear that the negative effects will overwhelm the positive ones.
Rodney Weidemann, Journalist, ITWeb
And while I will readily admit that current technology does have its own romantic uses - such as happens in the French town of Montbeliard, where wedding ceremonies at the city hall can be broadcast on a Webcam, allowing relatives in other countries to "attend" the ceremony - I fear that the negative effects will overwhelm the positive ones.
An example of this is a company in the US, which proclaims that it will help jealous lovers to spy on their mates` computer activity, through a special surveillance program, which is being marketed as a "way to catch a cheating lover".
Apparently, the surveillance program is sent as an electronic greeting - such as one of those electronic Valentine`s Day cards I mentioned earlier - but it doubles as a bugging device, downloading a type of spyware that records anything the victim does, including keystrokes, passwords, e-mail, chats and screen shots.
So now that you`re all nervous about just what your other half intended when they sent you that e-card, and are frantically checking to see if you`re being spied upon, remember, it could always be worse.
Pity the poor Greek man who was surfing an exhibitionist porn Web site and happened upon a video of his wife getting it on with her lover.
Although I must admit, I would have loved to have some kind of surveillance device around when the two of them resolved the inevitable and heated argument that would have come from that incident...
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