Dating Big Information: OkCupid’s OkTrends

Rosamond, Emily . 2016. ‘Dating Big Information: OkCupid’s OkTrends’. In: Love’s Archive. Arts University Bournemouth, Great Britain 14-15 March 2016. Conference or Workshop Item

Description or abstract

Truly, online dating services have actually profoundly changed individual everyday lives. In some instances, they have accelerated serendipity, joining together two different people who can fall in love. More ubiquitously (and much more mundanely), they will have subtly is uberhorny fake modified users’ means of flirting, understanding by themselves as “datable” subjects, speculating on future families, or thinking through exactly what a relationship could possibly be. Yet, as exemplars of a gathering point between intimate, personal life plus the algorithmic look of big information analytics, these platforms also talk to a profound rearrangement in the relations between personal everyday lives and privatized passions. Just how can one best articulate this shift?

Philosophical responses to dating that is online ranged from Alain Badiou’s sweeping dismissal, to Michel Feher’s (much more nuanced) account of dating platforms as exceptional of neoliberal sociality. For Badiou, online dating sites make shopping lists away from love. Finding potential lovers based on provided passions does not take into account love as a conference, which starts to build a full world of Two – a world lived from the viewpoint of distinction. For Feher, having said that, sharing (therefore burdensome for Badiou) is exactly the paradigm of neoliberal sociality. Both derivative finance and online platforms privilege sharing (of content, danger, passions, non-rival products, investment and feeling). Hence, Feher argues, online dating sites platforms articulate a simple question that is social to be able to have a relationship, just just exactly what must certanly be shared? Could it be a provided commitment, emotions, values, passions?

Through the viewpoint of sharing, through the viewpoint of huge huge difference: can Badiou and Feher’s geometries of internet dating be turned toward that 3rd partner, that quiet, data-analytic witness that watches when two potential online lovers flirt? A blog which makes light of trends in the dating site’s data analytics to explore this question, I examine OkCupid’s OkTrends. OkCupid, launched by Christian Rudder and a number of other data boffins, trades in individual information as opposed to registration income. The OkTrends blog reflects these analytics back into visitors, checking out results of these research on partnership and intimacy. (By way of example, one entry analyses “Race and Attraction, 2009-2014.”) This web site not just provides a location for individuals to get to know how their very own behavior may be provided by other daters; additionally will act as a meta-site by which users can learn how to fall in deep love with big information: to navigate its perspective of huge difference from single individual everyday lives; to open yourself and share in its insights and knowledge. Sharing, in this context, becomes not merely a condition that is social but additionally a new type of coupling between individual and analytic witnesses in love situations.

Item Type:

Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Keyword Phrases:

Internet dating, Information analytics, OkCupid, OkTrends

Divisions, Centres and Research Models:

Dates:

Event Location:

Arts University Bournemouth, Great Britain

Date range:

14-15 March 2016

Item ID:

Date Deposited:

16 Jan 2019 16:06

Final Modified:

29 Apr 2020 17:05

URI:

Copyright 2018 Goldsmiths, University of London.