Definition

“Online dating or Internet dating is a personal introductory system where individuals can find and contact each other over the Internet to arrange a date, usually with the objective of developing a personal, romantic, or sexual relationship.”

Online dating services usually provide unmoderated matchmaking over the Internet, through the use of personal computers or mobile phones. Users of an online dating service would usually provide personal information, to enable them to search the service provider’s database for other individuals, using filters in order to find their ‘perfect match‘. Members use criteria other members set, such as age range, gender and location.

“Online dating sites use market metaphors to match people. Match metaphors are conceptual frameworks that allow individuals to make sense of new concepts by drawing upon familiar experiences and frame-works. This metaphor of the marketplace – a place where people go to “shop” for potential romantic partners and to “sell” themselves in hopes of creating a successful romantic relationship – is highlighted by the layout and functionality of online dating websites. The marketplace metaphor may also resonate with participants’ conceptual orientation towards the process of finding a romantic partner.”

Heino, R.; N. Ellison; J. Gibbs (2010). “Relationshopping: Investigating the market metaphor in online dating.” The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

Deferences between the preference of online website:

• Most sites allow members to upload photos or videos of themselves and browse the photos and videos of others.
• Sites may offer additional services, such as webcasts, online chat, telephone chat (VOIP), and message boards.
• Some sites provide free registration, but may offer services which require a monthly fee.
• Other sites depend on advertising for their revenue.
• Some sites such as “OkCupid.com“, “POF.com” and “Badoo.com” are free and offer additional paid services in a freemium revenue model.

Online Dating Downfalls

Online dating however, makes it easier for people who have less confidence and can end up putting people in the position of having a relationship purely online. This can be cause to many people who are self-conscious about their sexuality or have trouble communicating this across to people because they are scared of what they might think and will end up being put off by them. These videos bellow show how online dating in this context has effected a group of men and women who call themselves transgender.

Reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA)

A study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that around 35% of the couples who got married between 2005 and 2012 met online. This data surely reveals how important social media has become in the field of relationships and love.

The  Internet, social networking, and online dating has affected how people meet future spouses, but little is known about the prevalence or outcomes of these marriages or the demographics of those involved. We addressed these questions in a nationally representative sample of 19,131 respondents who married between 2005 and 2012. Results indicate that more than one-third of marriages in America now begin online. In addition, marriages that began on-line, when compared with those that began through traditional off-line venues, were slightly less likely to result in a marital break-up (separation or divorce) and were associated with slightly higher marital satisfaction among those respondents who remained married. Demographic differences were identified between respondents who met their spouse through on-line vs. traditional off-line venues, but the findings for marital break-up and marital satisfaction remained significant after statistically controlling for these differences. These data suggest that the Internet may be altering the dynamics and outcomes of marriage itself.

The rise in the Internet has transformed how Americans work, play, search, shop, study, and communicate. Facebook has grown from its inception in 2004 to over a billion users, and Twitter has grown from its start in 2006 to more than 500 million users. The 2011 American Time Use Survey indicates that, on average, men now spend 9.65% and women spend 6.81% of their leisure time on-line. The Internet has also changed how Americans meet their spouse. Meeting a marital partner in traditional off-line venues has declined over the past several decades but meeting online has grown dramatically, with on-line dating now a billion-dollar industry with many markets people invest in. Experiments in which strangers are randomly assigned to interact using computer-mediated communications versus face-to-face communications show that the more anonymous online meetings produce greater self-disclosure and liking as long as the interaction is not under strong time constraints. Consistent with these experimental studies, research of online users suggests that authentic online self-disclosures are associated with more enduring face-to-face friendships. 

The demographic characteristics of the respondents who married between 2005 and 2012 as well as US Census data for married individuals indicated that the weighted sample of 19,131 respondents was generally representative. For each marriage, participants were asked the month and year of the marriage and, if the most recent marriage ended in divorce, the month and year of the divorce. As summarised, 92.01% of the sample reported being currently married, 4.94% reported being divorced, 2.50% reported being separated from their spouse, and 0.55% reported being widowed. As in prior research, marital break-ups were defined as separated or divorced and constituted 7.44% of the sample.

Online Dating has been critically acclaimed however that it is more of a ‘Taboo‘ subject rather than a serious matter. Ellen De Generes was discussing on her show the major online mobile and internet site ‘Tinder‘ in conjunction with a viral video claiming that Queen Elizabeth was using the site. This video shows a parody towards the Queens masked reaction when a person asks her opinions towards the app, this is all however, a false claim made by Elizabeth herself.

Case Study: Tinder

Tinder is a location-based dating and social discovery service application (using Facebook) that facilitates communication between mutually interested users, allowing matched users to chat. The app was launched in 2012, and by 2014 it was registering about one billion “swipes” per day. Tinder is among the first “swiping apps”, where the user uses a swiping motion to choose between the photos of other users: swiping right for potentially good matches and swiping left on a photo to move to the next one.

As seen above, the image shows the company’s slogan:

“Its how people meet”

The confidence and boldness of that statement shows a considerable amount of change within the dating game since online dating became a well-known, popular way of going about romance. VFMagazine, on 6th August 2015 published an article explaining: “Tinder and the Dawn of the “Dating Apocalypse”. Vanity Fair explains that in a typical night of the suburban downtown area of Manhattan’s ‘Stout Sports Bar‘ –

“Everyone is drinking, peering into their screens and swiping on the faces of strangers they may have sex with later that evening. Or not. “Ew, this guy has Dad bod,” a young woman says of a potential match, swiping left. Her friends smirk, not looking up.”

 

“Guys view everything as a competition,”with his deep, reassuring voice. “Who’s slept with the best, hottest girls?” With these dating apps, he says, “you’re always sort of prowling. You could talk to two or three girls at a bar and pick the best one, or you can swipe a couple hundred people a day—the sample size is so much larger. It’s setting up two or three Tinder dates a week and, chances are, sleeping with all of them, so you could rack up 100 girls you’ve slept with in a year.”

Alex,  Tinder user.

“SEX HAS BECOME SO EASY”

“I call it the Dating Apocalypse,”

says a woman in New York, aged 29.

“Hookup culture”, which has been percolating for about a hundred years, has collided with dating apps, which have acted like a wayward meteor on the now rare rituals of courtship.

“We are in uncharted territory” when it comes to Tinder.

 Justin Garcia, a research scientist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

There have been two major ‘transitions‘ in heterosexual mating in the last four million years, Garcia says. The first was around 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, in the agricultural revolution, when we became less migratory and more settled, leading to the establishment of marriage as a cultural contract. The second major transition being the rise of the Internet. People used to meet their partners through proximity, through family and friends, but now Internet meeting is surpassing every other form.

“It’s changing so much about the way we act both romantically and sexually,”

Garcia says.

“It is unprecedented from an evolutionary standpoint.”

As soon as people could go online they were using it as a way to find partners to date and have sex with. “In the 90s it was Craigslist and AOL chat rooms, then Match.com and Kiss.com”. But the lengthy, heartfelt e-mails exchanged by the main characters in You’ve Got Mail (1998) seem positively Victorian in comparison to the messages sent on the average dating app today, showing that in a space of ten years people’s attitudes have changed towards the way we go about the contexts of love.

Mobile dating went mainstream; by 2012 it was overtaking online dating. In February, one study reported there were nearly 100 million people—perhaps 50 million on Tinder alone—using their phones as a sort of all-day, every-day, handheld singles club, where they might find a taboo sex partner as easily as they’d find a cheap flight to Florida.

“It’s like ordering Seamless,”

says Dan, the investment banker, referring to the online food-delivery service.

“But you’re ordering a person.”

This lends the comparison between movie dating and online shopping as it seems Dating apps are the free-market economy come to sex. The innovation of Tinder was the swipe—the flick of a finger on a picture, no more elaborate profiles necessary and no more fear of rejection; users only know whether they’ve been approved, never when they’ve been discarded. OkCupid soon adopted the function. Hinge, which allows for more information about a match’s circle of friends through Facebook, and Happn, which enables G.P.S. tracking to show whether matches have recently “crossed paths,” use it too. It’s telling that swiping has been jocularly incorporated into advertisements for various products, a nod to the notion that, online, the act of choosing consumer brands and sex partners has become interchangeable.