Open AccessDating Apps: The Uncertainty of Marketised Love
Author(s) -
Carolina Bandinelli,
Alessandro Gandini
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
cultural sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.79
H-Index - 33
eISSN - 1749-9763
pISSN - 1749-9755
DOI - 10.1177/17499755211051559
Subject(s) - sociotechnical system , sociology , rationality , interpersonal communication , perspective (graphical) , romance , sociocultural evolution , epistemology , social psychology , psychology , computer science , knowledge management , social science , psychoanalysis , philosophy , artificial intelligence , anthropology
Dating apps promise a ‘digital fix’ to the ‘messy’ matter of love by means of datafication and algorithmic matching, realising a platformisation of romance commonly understood through notions of a market’s rationality and efficiency. Reflecting on the findings of a small-scale qualitative research on the use of dating apps among young adults in London, we problematise this view and argue that the specific form of marketisation articulated by dating apps is entrepreneurial in kind, whereby individuals act as brands facing the structural uncertainty of interacting with ‘quasi-strangers’. In so doing, we argue, dating app users enact a Luhmanian notion of interpersonal trust, built on the assessment of the risk of interacting with unfamiliar others that is typical of digitally mediated contexts dominated by reputational logics. From a sociocultural perspective, dating apps emerge as sociotechnical apparatuses that remediate the demand to rationally choose a partner while at the same time reproducing the (im)possibility of doing so. In this respect, far from offering a new form of efficiency, they (re)produce the ontological uncertainty (Illouz, 2019) that characterises lovers as entrepreneurs.