I, too, am sure that the 'old style cruising' will never really disappear. Think of a city like San Francisco, as pointed out by Bob here. There are very many openly gay men in the city. Quite a few people are, well, 'open minded' and tourists and visitors flock the city, too. It is really hard to imagine that no one will ever try to cruise the GG park, the dunes, the area around the mill close to the Ocean Beach, etc. Or the Buena Vista Park or whatever other cruising area there may be.
Yet, if you contrast the numbers of the guys, and the relative intensity of the cruising at such places these days with the pre-net times when we were all reading the ads at the Sentinel or at the the Bay Area Guardian in order to get ourselves a suitable date, and when most of us flocked to either the SoMa bars or clubs or to the Market/Castro locations for the NSA hookups, you do see a tectonic change that the modernity has brought about.
I, too, see this as an evolutionary process. Think of the AOL m2m chat rooms, IRCs across the country, etc., all the way to the apps of these days.
On some level, and at some locations, at least one more factor worked against the 'old style cruising' - the drugs. I know of quite a few popular bars and clubs across Europe that used to be your prime cruising spots. The places were kept reasonably nice, clean and inviting. Their business used to be good, probably because they had loyal regulars who would be bringing in good cashflow. These guys saw cruising as a bit of a social interaction with other like-minded guys, too.
Only too soon, the dealers discovered the convenience of such, well, dark, limited access places, and started running their business along. A formerly good neighborhood bar with an active backroom degenerated into something very different. Many regulars left, and soon enough, the place closed down...
KD
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