Information and communication technology permeates all areas of our lives, including private and intimate ones such as partnership and sexuality. While operating mostly invisibly, it forms the very substrate that facilitates many of today’s services, and from this position of power it mediates and surveys active, human-initiated as well as automated, operational communication.

Online Dating services are no exception in the way that they follow market dynamics and technological or artistic trends in app design. Their other aspects are rather novel, e.g. the way they introduce dynamics into the social networks they form, how they fuel and foster specific patterns in human communication, or their monetary and non-monetary economical ramifications from engagement and pay-for-use to

presenting and rating oneself and others.

I view Online Dating as a prototypical representative service for a discussion about the opportunities and limitations of technology design, from the intimate use and real-life outcomes to the human-facing aspects of, e.g., apps and websites, and down into the infrastructure. My hope is for better-educated developers to understand the societal consequences of their professional performance better, create more transparent services, and enable users to take better-informed decisions when using technology. In addition, I consider computer science as a scientific discipline to be overdue for sincere self-reflection about the ever-simplifying, problem-solving focused mindset it represents and continues to teach.

For the interdisciplinary workshop, I would like to reflect my insights into technical conditions and self-conceptions that shape technological artefacts, and build bridges to other scientific disciplines to foster the mutual understanding of viewpoints. This is as much a desire for an exchange about Online Dating as a particularly representative case, as well as a step towards posing the bigger questions of scientists’ and engineers’ roles and responsibilities in society, their goals, ambitions, and professional decency, etc. which are too often postponed in my field.