Dating Big Information: OkCupid’s OkTrends
Rosamond, Emily . 2016. ‘Dating Big Information: OkCupid’s OkTrends’. In: Love’s Archive. Arts University Bournemouth, Uk 14-15 March 2016. Conference or Workshop Item
Description or abstract
Certainly, online dating services have actually profoundly changed individual everyday lives. In some instances, they usually have accelerated serendipity, combining a couple who’ll fall in love. More ubiquitously (and much more mundanely), they will have subtly modified users’ means of flirting, understanding on their own as «datable” subjects, speculating on future families, or thinking through just what a relationship could possibly be. Yet, as exemplars of a gathering point between intimate, personal life and also the algorithmic look of big information analytics, these platforms additionally talk with a profound rearrangement in the relations between personal everyday lives and privatized passions. Just how can one best articulate this shift?
Philosophical responses to online dating sites have actually 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, internet dating sites make shopping lists away from love. Finding partners that are prospective on provided passions fails to 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 difficult for Badiou) is exactly the paradigm of neoliberal sociality. Both finance that is derivative online platforms privilege sharing (of content, danger, passions, non-rival products, investment and feeling). Hence, Feher argues, online dating sites platforms articulate a simple social concern: so that you can have relationship, exactly just what needs to be shared? Could it be a provided commitment, emotions, values, passions?
Through the viewpoint of sharing, through the viewpoint of huge 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, established by Christian Rudder and a number of other information researchers, trades in individual information instead of registration income. The OkTrends web log reflects these analytics back once again to visitors, checking out results of these research on closeness and partnership. (as an example, one entry analyses «Race and Attraction, 2009-2014.”) This website not just provides a spot for folks to come calmly to know how their very own behavior could be provided by other daters; in addition it will act as 
a meta-site by which users can learn how to fall in deep love with big information: to navigate its viewpoint of huge difference from single individual life; 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 unique as a type of coupling between human being 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.