Online dating has become big business over the last decade. But does this mean we're looking for love in a different way?
Maybe it's the sunshine; maybe it's the royal wedding, but last week the nation fell in love with love again. There's been a lot of it about; I've "accidentally" cycled over my fair share of lovers snogging in the shade in sun-drenched parks. But is love different today than when William's mum and dad were hitched in 1981? Sure, last Friday's regal nuptials were livestreamed on YouTube, but Charles and Diana's was broadcast live around the world on TV. How different is falling in love in the age of the internet?
Personally, the modern, technologically mediated pursuit of love feels different. I was in a relationship for 13 years. It started in early 1997, before the web had inextricably woven itself into the fabric of society, and it ended in early 2010. I fell in love the first time in the age of email, not always-on, technologically mediated hyperlinked social media. I didn't even have a mobile phone.
My instincts, based on this Rip van Winkle perspective, say that web technology has affected our practice of falling in love. "Online dating used to be something that people turned to when they were giving up on offline dating," says Sam Yagan, CEO and co-founder of OKCupid, a site that has the largest registered user-base of 18- to 34-year-olds in the US. "It is now a tool that people are turning to, to complement their offline dating, to meet other people you might not meet in your day-to-day life." Research from the Oxford Internet Institute's "Me, My Spouse and the Internet: Meeting, Dating and Marriage in the Digital Age" project corroborates Yagan's argument, reporting that 22.6% of current relationships in the UK that began since my ex and I began courting, began online.
According to Professor Monica Whitty, author of Cyberspace Romance, our current concept of romantic love is based on a mid-19th-century evolution from strategic partnerships into the roses and white wedding dresses promulgated by magazines, soap operas and Disney movies. The latter invokes images of presenting a true self to a single lover who accepts us, warts and all; the former, the exchange of properties. Yagan thinks relationships that come from online dating are more likely to stick: instead of settling for one person out of a pool of 200, he argues, you'll be assured that the one you've chosen out of two million is the best fit. So what we're after hasn't changed conceptually, we've just become a bit more businesslike about it.
Is it paradoxical that a cold, logical machine has become an important mediator for the most warm and fuzzy of human emotions? Social scientists and lay observers have been describing the bonds that develop through technology since the telegraph, around the time that our modern concept of romance first emerged; Tom Standage wrote about love over the wires in the late 1800s in his book The Victorian Internet. He also notes that the first "on-line" wedding took place between a bride in Boston and a groom in New York in 1848.
Julian Dibbell's descriptions of his personal infatuations in the text-based community LambdaMOO in the early 1990s orient attraction as a product of semantics and idealisation: "Well-rounded, colourful sentences start to do the work of big, brown, soulful eyes; too many typos in a character's description can have about the same effect as dandruff flakes on a black sweater." The rules haven't changed. Well, not much.
We do still pay heed to first impressions. Writing a profile for an online dating site or for an online community is an exercise in balancing personal marketing and reality. This can potentially backfire; if, as Dibbell says, "in [virtual reality], it's the best writers who get laid", it should pay to get a skilled ghostwriter. But, as a friend with an enormously successful profile for a dating site discovered, you have to live up to the prose. You can be too awesome; it pays to include a few warts and all.
"People cannot lie about constitutive personal features, such as a sense of humour, wittiness, and personal interests, all of which emerge during lengthy online conversations," says Professor Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, whose research has explored openness and honesty between people in online environments. "Online relationships encourage many people to present a more accurate picture of their true self," he says.
When it comes to online services outside the dating websites that feed the love bug, social networks are great at providing a context for a potential match. They expose similarity based on the number of shared connections, or the types of things users like. Status updates on social networks give the impression of being in a place at the same time, even when one or the other person is away from the computer. And participation in subject-specific online communities gives people something to talk about.
But there is one thing in this online love battlefield that does make it feel awfully different from my first courtship: our proclivity for sharing personal things with virtual strangers ? whether because of a heightened sense of anonymity or reduced social presence ? leads to intensely electric interactions. These "hyper-personal" relationships, as Whitty describes them, can create problems for people already in a committed pair. "Online seduction is just a click away," says Professor Ben-Ze'ev. Great for cheap thrills, but potentially destructive for long-term relationships.
I'm reassured that the process of falling in love has remained generally the same, but wonder how, in the long term, our strategic pursuit of The One will affect what we expect from a relationship. Are we placing too much hope on technology to provide us with an unattainable romantic ideal, or will we be satisfied that we have found Mr or Ms Right out of the potential population of lovers?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/may/01/online-dating-untangling-the-web
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