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 lives that are personal. From time to time, they usually have accelerated serendipity, joining together a couple that will fall in love. More ubiquitously (and much more mundanely), they will have subtly changed users’ means of flirting, understanding on their own as “datable” subjects, speculating on future families, or tids website thinking through what a relationship could possibly be. Yet, as exemplars of a gathering point between intimate, personal lives plus the algorithmic look of big information analytics, these platforms additionally talk with a rearrangement that is profound 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 excellent of neoliberal sociality. For Badiou, internet dating sites make shopping lists away from love. Finding partners that are prospective on provided passions doesn’t take into account love as a conference, which starts to build an environment of Two – a world lived through 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). Therefore, Feher argues, online dating sites platforms articulate a simple question that is social to be able to have relationship, just exactly just what must certanly be provided? Will it be a provided dedication, emotions, values, passions?

Through the viewpoint of sharing, through the viewpoint of 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? To explore this concern, we examine OkCupid’s OkTrends, a web log making light of styles into the dating site’s information analytics. OkCupid, launched by Christian Rudder and a number of other information researchers, trades in individual information in place of registration income. The OkTrends weblog reflects these analytics back into visitors, checking out results of these research on partnership and intimacy. (as an example, one entry analyses “Race and Attraction, 2009-2014.”) This website not just provides a location for folks to come quickly to know how their behaviour that is own might provided by other daters; moreover it will act as a meta-site through which users can figure out how to fall deeply in love with big information: to navigate its viewpoint of distinction from single human life; to open yourself and share in its insights and knowledge. Sharing, in this context, becomes not merely a social condition, but additionally a brand new type of coupling between peoples and analytic witnesses in love situations.

Item Type:

Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Keyword Phrases:

Online dating sites, 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.