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Position Statements

Peter Rantaša (cognitive science)

Vienna Cognitive Science Hub, University of Vienna, Austria

Social relationships, partnership, and family in whatever form are essential for a successful life and the experience of happiness and satisfaction. The
intrusion of unrelated and self-interested "third parties" through technologically mediated services in post-digital normality raises many questions. It requires holistic and long-term consideration of the individual and collective situational context at different stages of life, both in terms of descriptive ("methods") and normative ("ethics") aspects to answer them.

Technologies are always co-constitutive and formative for the potential and actualized lifeworlds of their users. The influence of dating apps extends far beyond the moment of their concrete use - it lives on in the lifestyles and relationships they create, down to the level of genetic inheritance in any
descendants.

Interdisciplinary approaches for a comprehensive understanding of dating apps need compatible concepts from philosophy and cultural studies to technology (e.g., language, concept engineering, persuasive technologies/interfaces, AI), cognitive science (social cognition, affective science, psychology, biology, and medicine (mental health, happiness, addiction, love, sex/ development, aging), sociology, business administration (marketing, business models), economics and political economy, law, engineering, and computer science and probably some more. These must be aligned to a common goal.

One can only draw an optimistic future with dating apps if we overcome the current market-driven platform capitalism. Innovation potentials, which open up through the currently prepared interfaces (VR, avatars, brain-computer interfaces, etc.) connected with machine learning, AI, and Big Data, need to be used in the real interest of the users to serve love in all its forms.


Kai Dröge (sociology)

Lucerne University of Applied Science and Art, Switzerland and
Institute for Social Research at the Goethe-University Frankfurt Main, Germany

These statements are based on research that I did some years ago together with my colleague Olivier Voirol from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. This study was mainly based on qualitative in-depth interviews with users of dating platforms. Look at http://romanticentrepreneur.net/ for more information (mostly in German, sorry).

I see online dating as part of a much broader development in which technical mediation becomes increasingly important in intimate spaces and relationships - think about how people relate to their own body via fitness trackers and apps, how our most private spaces become populated by connected things and digital assistants, how crucial social media is for personal relationships today.

One of my main research interests is the economic dimension of these developments – what I would call "intimate digital economies". Two statements about online dating in this direction:

Online Dating and the exploitation of emotional labor
Like with many online platforms, the biggest economic asset of any dating site is actually produced by their users – profiles, photos, intimate interactions like messages and dates, etc. Having a very active and attractive membership is the main selling point that draws new (paying) customers towards a particular platform. We have described this as a form of "emotional labor" (Arlie Hochschild), since the emotional interactions of the users produce an economic surplus value which can be exploited by the platform.

Online Dating and the exploitation of the romantic economy of love
Given how difficult it is to sell paid services on the internet, it is strange that users of dating platforms often pay a substantial monthly fee for what could be described as a very basic service. Our interviews show clearly that this is only possible because the modern romantic narrative conceptualizes the economics of love in a very particular way: In romantic interactions, we are supposed to not care about money, to engage in "conspicuous consumption" (Thorstein Veblen), to buy useless but expensive stuff like rings and flowers, or: to waste our money on dating platforms. This is what has made online dating into an important cash cow of the internet economy for many years.

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