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< | Intimacy in the Age of the Internet | >
> | The Online Dating Conflict: Connection vs. Capital | | | | |
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< | -- By AparnaSundaram - 09 Oct 2020 | >
> | -- By AparnaSundaram - 07 Jan 2021 | | | | |
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< | Introduction | >
> | I. Introduction | | | | |
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< | In its infancy, online dating offered the same promise as the internet itself—connection. If you felt constrained by your small town, through the internet you might meet someone from across the country. If you were afraid of approaching a stranger in person, through the internet you could do so from the comfort of your home and through the safety of a screen. Today, there are more online dating platforms than menu items at many restaurants. The most popular dating applications have millions of users worldwide. Online dating has evolved from a mere possibility of the internet age into a behemoth industry in its own right. This evolution has changed our understanding of personhood while preying on our worst inclinations. | >
> | In its infancy, online dating offered the same promise as the internet itself—connection. If you felt constrained by your small town, through the internet you might meet someone from across the country. If you were afraid of approaching a stranger in person, through the internet you could do so from the comfort of your home. This promise proved alluring, and online dating services proliferated. The most popular dating applications now have millions of users worldwide. Although online dating services promise connection, that promise is removed from the profit structure of these services. Facing a conflict between their stated purpose and their means to revenue, online dating services have chosen the latter, to the detriment of users. | | | | |
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< | I. Stranger Danger: Early Online Dating and Fear of the Catfish | >
> | II. The Promise | | | | |
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< | Anonymity on the internet grants freedom and provokes fear. Anonymity allows shy people, for instance, to form connections on their terms in a social environment more accommodating to their needs. On the other hand, anonymity cloaks all sorts of predators. Cautionary tales suggest that a teenager might venture online in pursuit of friendship and find herself lured into a relationship with a much older person. Then there is the danger of the catfish. Have you really found your dream man or woman on the internet or is the person you were speaking to someone else entirely? With the first dating websites came an adjacent industry of do-gooders hoping to uncover such characters, protecting the innocent from conmen and creeps. | >
> | Dating applications and websites aim to connect you with potential romantic partners. As the industry has matured, companies no longer abide by your stated preferences in presenting you with potential matches. Rather, they “attempt to identify and exploit the dissonance between what you say you want and what you really appear to want, through the choices you make online.” Sometimes, this means providing you potential matches of your own race even when you have indicated that you would indicated you would be willing to date outside it. Perhaps this sort of filtering helps maximize the number of “connections” you get, but it also provides dating applications with an excellent system for collecting data on users. As one writer put it, “in no other milieu do so many people, from such a broad demographic swath, willingly answer so many intimate questions.” Online dating services claim that this information helps them refine their algorithms so that they can better connect you with matches you want to meet. But dating is a far more complex market than the market for goods, and it is much harder to accurately predict a person’s preferences in human connection than it is to predict their desire for a new exercise device or a toaster. It is not evident that all this data has markedly improved the quality of online dating services. Despite this lack of evidence, more and more people are signing up for such services and sharing intimate information in the process. | | | | |
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< | As online dating has matured, its mechanisms for tackling this fear have changed. The industry for detecting fake profiles is no longer adjacent to online dating companies but an integral part of their business model, at least as it is advertised. Now, you might sign up for your dating platform through Facebook or link your Instagram account. Both are taken as signals that you are who you are presenting yourself as online. Some platforms, like Bumble, purport to use facial recognition to verify whether a user is real. If you agree to take a picture of yourself when you create your account and Bumble’s technology determines that that picture adequately resembles those on your profile, then you will receive the great gift of a verification mark. These mechanisms suggest that people think to search someone online, and, conversely, to be searchable, is to be safe. A person who links a dating profile to an Instagram account or who agrees to take a selfie for Bumble is more likely to be who they say they are. In this way, personhood has become dangerously intertwined with platform use. | >
> | III. The Profit | | | | |
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> | Online dating providers do not directly profit from the data they collect on you or from you meeting up with a potential partner. Instead, they earn money from subscription packages, add-on purchases, and advertising revenue. The first model for collecting revenue, subscriptions, has become less popular with the advent of dating applications. When there are a plethora of “free” options, people are less willing to sign up for a website that requires a monthly fee. The second, add-on purchases, is common. For instance, the application or website might allow you to pay for more time to speak with someone through its service where it would normally limit the window of interaction. Most commonly, add-on purchases consist of people paying for access to more profiles or for visibility into the people who have indicated interest in their profile. Advertising is the final route to revenue. Online dating services make money through third parties who pay for advertising space or insight. Third parties might pay for the online dating service to display advertisements to its users. They might also pay to solicit data from online dating services in order to better market their products to consumers. | | | | |
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< | II. Biases and Apathy in Data Processing | >
> | IV. The Outcomes | | | | |
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< | Diversity is one of the great draws of the online world. Online, you might date outside your race or socioeconomic status without changing your social network. Online, you can present a gender identity and seek a partner of a gender of your choosing, even if you cannot do so in the place where you live. The promise of online dating is that if you trust the process and allow the platforms to safeguard your secrets, then you can be your real self in ways that the physical world might not allow. Reality, of course, is far from that. Even if you hope to meet people outside your social sphere, a dating application that relies on its algorithm to choose matches for you might be more likely to give you matches of your own ethnicity, for example. And what of your other private information? Perhaps you confide in the application that you are a man seeking to date other men, or that you use hard drugs, or that you are a religious minority. You may not choose to publish that information, but there is no guarantee that the application will not share that information on your behalf. For instance, Grindr, an application serving gay, bi, trans, and queer people was leaking data to advertisers, unbeknownst to its users. | >
> | Online dating services promise connection if users both create a profile, sharing personal information that they want potential partners to see, and state their private preferences, disclosing even more personal information to the service. Through this promise, online dating services manage to lure users into disclosing all sorts of sensitive information. These services also advertise themselves as non-exclusive. Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge, for example, all advertise themselves in slightly different ways, promising to scratch a slightly different itch. People are encouraged to share, not with one platform, but with several, their most private information. | | | | |
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< | Dating platforms encourage their users to trust them. The more information you give the platform, the better the platform can serve you and the higher your likelihood of finding a partner. Dating platforms also advertise themselves as non-exclusive. Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge, for example, all advertise themselves in slightly different ways, promising to scratch a slightly different itch. People are encouraged to share, not with one platform, but with several, their most private information in the increasingly futile hopes of fostering a connection. These platforms do little to repay the trust granted to them by their users. | >
> | These services do not make money from using this data to successfully connect you with a romantic connection. Instead, they make most of their money either by convincing you that you are more likely to find a connection if you pay for better services or by disclosing your private information to companies that use it to sell you unrelated products. Dating services have well-developed tools to convince you that more meaningful connection is just a small payment away. For instance, Bumble might see that you have been swiping on profiles unsuccessfully and suggest you sign up for a service which automatically connects you with people who have already liked your profile. This is one example of what Shoshana Zuboff described as surveillance capitalists “intervening in the state of play in order to nudge, coax, tune, and herd behavior toward profitable outcomes.” Worse yet, online dating services make money by sharing sensitive information with third parties without users being fully aware that this is happening.
Notes
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< | Where to Next? | >
> | V. Conclusion | | | | |
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< | As one dating application, Hinge, puts it, a functional dating application is “designed to be deleted.” Connection forms away from these platforms, not within the confines of their chatting contraptions. Yet, in the end, the only true intimacy formed through online dating happens between the platform and the user. The platform knows your height and your height preferences in a partner. It knows what you like on Facebook, what you post on Instagram, whether you use drugs and if so, which drugs you use. The platform knows if you tend to prefer people of a certain race, education, or socioeconomic background. The unnerving experience of reviewing your data from such a platform would reveal that the platform knows, perhaps better than you yourself, what you like to say to start a conversation and when you are likely to end it. Until people realize that online dating is not at all designed to be deleted, there is the danger that human connection will continue to slip further from our grasp.
This is a good first draft. It gets the facts onto the page. The route to improvement is to use the material here, more tightly edited, as the foundation for your idea, which is still obscure. The conclusion, with its suggestion that "human connection" is "slipping" is not an outgrowth of anything previously said in the draft, and if it is the primary idea of the essay is introduced much too late to contribute to the reader's experience.
Nothing said here about online dating facilitators could not be said about the bars, the dance halls, or any of the other meeting and sexual-enablement venues of urban life in the twentieth century. But you are undoubtedly right that there are new things to say. Building on what is here already, you should say one of them.
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> | As Shoshana Zuboff articulated, “digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends." This should be particularly troubling for users of online dating services. These services collect the most intimate information about people—their sexuality and sexual history, drug use, and racial preferences, among other things. This information has not yet radically improved the ability of such services to foster meaningful connections, but it does serve as valuable fodder for advertising revenue. The discrepancy between the stated purpose of dating applications and their potential avenues for profit leaves users in the lurch—paying for perks and products that benefit the service, not the user. | | |
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |
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