Building Relationships: Online Dating and the New Logics of Internet Culture

by Dawn Shepherd

Overview

Matchmaking is a tradition as old as marriage itself, and the activities and practices surrounding it have shifted alongside marriage. Building Relationships: Online Dating and the New Logics of Internet Culture uses an apparatus approach to media analysis to examine logics of compatibility, online dating site procedures, and user narratives of popular matchmaking sites. Shepherd's investigation serves as a case study to help understand the larger relationship between contemporary identity and what she calls matching technologies, as well as the complex of big data, computational processing, and the cultural assumptions that power today’s most popular web applications.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498535830
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	11/01/2017
Pages:	172
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.01(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Dawn Shepherd is an assistant professor of English and associate director of the First-Year Writing Program at Boise State University.

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Romantic Matchmaking and the Marriage Apparatus
Chapter Two: Procedural Rhetorical Analysis of Three Online Dating Sites
Chapter Three: Online Dating and the Construction of Subjects
Chapter Four: Online Dating, Biopower, and Discourses of Success
Chapter Five: Online Dating, Marriage, and Family in Control Societies
Chapter Six: Postscript on Technologies of Matching

Editorial Reviews

[The] main originality of this book is in applying procedural rhetoric to the study of matching sites. In fact, as they become more popular and more accessible, the complex procedures of these sites, which include symbolic values and unequivocal implications of what a good match may be, are certainly influencing newer generations' understanding of their relationships. In turn, daily practices and expressions of dating, sexuality, marriage, same-sex relationships, friendships, and even family, are impacted by these transformations.

Families & Spirituality Marriage

Shepherd gives a careful theoretical treatment to the apparatus of digitally mediated matchmaking and its connections with traditional assumptions of love, romance, and the institution of marriage. An important work for students of digital technology, networks, and/or the family.

Jenny L. Davis

Building Relationships contributes to the study of digital rhetoric by focusing on both digital identity performance and the role of the underlying algorithms—as coupled with user experience and design choices—of online matchmaking sites. Shepherd provides an exemplary methodology for digital rhetoric projects and takes the reader into the richly textured world of online dating systems.

Doug Eyman

Dawn Shepherd offers match as a replacement for search as the operative logic for how we find things and how they find us online. By situating online dating within the long history of mediated matchmaking, Shepherd breaks free from the presentist accounts of media technologies that treat each contemporary phenomenon with its accompanying technological system as if it "changes everything". Matchmaking provides a useful analytic for understanding a broad array of internet protocols, algorithms, and procedures that abound in our information-driven world. Whether we are looking for love in the right or wrong places, Shepherd shows us that what we love is central to how the internet makes itself known to us.

Jeremy Packer