Lucy Carlyle explores Love in the Time of Algorithms, as part of Maclynn Reviews series.
This book explores the many pros and cons of on-line dating, looking way back into history at the traditional role of the matchmaker, it reviews the early beginnings of the internet and how ‘entrepreneurial geeks’ used computers in order to get dates for the next college social. Love in the Time of Algorithms covers how the introduction of the internet has helped develop the way in which we search for a partner in modern day society.
Online dating is big business, turning over billions of dollars a year, with each of the big dating sites using an assortment of algorithms, each claiming to be better than the other when it comes to finding you your ‘perfect’ partner. Interestingly, Slater has a somewhat unique perspective when it comes to the subject of on-line dating. His parents met through an early on-line dating site called Match.Inc in the 1960’s, a service which folded a few years later. Back then the algorithms for on-line dating were in their most simplistic form. You were matched in the most basic way, and for the most part the guys behind these early sites were nothing more than college students who were fed up with going home from an event on their own.
As the internet grew more popular so did the use of on-line dating sites. The traditional stigma that was once attached to using these sites has since lessoned and now, with the vast majority of single men and women in the US having tried on-line dating, Slater asks “is on-line dating remaking the landscape of the modern relationship?”
The question of whether the use of on-line dating will have a negative or positive effect on society remains to be answered. Technology makes it so easy to access thousands of people via a computer, laptop, tablet or phone and these sites sell the fact that you are just one click away from finding your future partner. But by having everything at your fingertips, and access to an enormous database of other singletons, do you run the risk of missing out on the one for you? Have we gameified dating? This concept goes hand in hand with our ‘throwaway society’, and in this case perhaps the ease of finding a new partner makes it easier to ‘move on to the next one’. It takes away the human element from finding your other half.
In this book Slater shares stories from a collection of internet daters, all having their own unique experience of the on-line dating world (the good, the bad and the ugly).
It could be argued that the landscape of ‘the modern relationship’ is ever changing. With the improvement of communications, equality of the sexes and the ease of travel, perhaps on-line dating is just the next chapter.
It’s an interesting concept. You input your details, someone else, somewhere else in the world inputs theirs and a computer matches you. Simple. But what if it’s also the case that the prospect of finding an “ever more compatible mate with the click of a mouse means a future of relationship instability, a paradox of choice that keeps us chasing the illusive bunny around the dating track?”
Review by Lucy Carlyle
