Page History

In recent years, online dating has evolved from a shady niche industry to a remarkable mainstream phenomenon. For the first time in human history, the
the  arrangement of intimate relationships and sexualityis sexuality is now taking place via digital technologies on a global mass market. The stock corporation Match Group alone offers its products in over 40 different languages and reports a worldwide turnover of 2.4 billion USD for 2020. In general, it is assumed that about 40% of all relationships in western societies start online nowadays (Rosenfeld 2019).

Thus, dating sites have the potential to transform our current notion of pick up and falling in love, while raising significant questions about the agency of technology and its socio-technical impact. On the one hand dating sites offer a low-threshold option for initial contacts and facilitate emancipatory
empowerment, but they also lead to a number of questionable implications.

Beside issues like chat bot scam or sexual harassment, critical reference can be made to reductionistic tendencies in the design of these platforms, which are evident at least in the absence of the usual social context and body-to-body behavior and ultimately determines communication in a way that personal emotions are turned into computable data.

By this means, online dating results in an economic quantification of intimate practices and fosters a kind of digital positivism (Fuchs 2017), whereby the search for a suitable partner becomes a statistical calculation and algorithms act as pimps.

Instead of focusing on the monitoring and commodification of users' sensitive data, an ideal future development of dating technologies should seek to address a real human-centric approach that primarily serves the common good of love, whereby the principles of digital humanism can function as general ethical guidelines.

Successful interdisciplinary cooperation in this matter would be a collaboration of different scientific disciplines (like humanities, social sciences, and
engineering studies) that complement each other in their methodical and epistemological approaches in analyzing the phenomenon and thereby enable a holistic view that is more than the sum of its parts.