Dating Apps: The Uncertainty of Marketised Love

IF 1.4 1区社会学 Q2 SOCIOLOGY

Cultural Sociology Pub Date : 2022-01-10 DOI:10.1177/17499755211051559

C. Bandinelli, A. Gandini

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引用次数: 6

Abstract

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.

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约会软件:市场化爱情的不确定性

约会软件承诺通过数据化和算法匹配来“数字化”解决“混乱”的爱情问题，实现了通常通过市场理性和效率概念来理解的浪漫平台化。通过对伦敦年轻人使用约会应用程序的小规模定性研究的结果进行反思，我们对这一观点提出了质疑，并认为约会应用程序所表达的市场化的具体形式是创业性质的，在这种情况下，个人作为品牌，面对与“准陌生人”互动的结构不确定性。我们认为，在这样做的过程中，约会应用程序用户制定了一种卢曼式的人际信任概念，这种概念建立在对与不熟悉的人互动风险的评估之上，这是典型的由声誉逻辑主导的数字媒介环境。从社会文化的角度来看，约会软件是作为一种社会技术工具出现的，它弥补了理性选择伴侣的需求，同时也重现了这样做的可能性。在这方面，它们非但没有提供一种新的效率形式，反而(重新)产生了本体论上的不确定性(Illouz, 2019)，而这种不确定性正是情侣作为企业家的特征。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Cultural Sociology SOCIOLOGY-

CiteScore

3.30

自引率

10.50%

发文量

期刊介绍： Cultural Sociology publishes empirically oriented, theoretically sophisticated, methodologically rigorous papers, which explore from a broad set of sociological perspectives a diverse range of socio-cultural forces, phenomena, institutions and contexts. The objective of Cultural Sociology is to publish original articles which advance the field of cultural sociology and the sociology of culture. The journal seeks to consolidate, develop and promote the arena of sociological understandings of culture, and is intended to be pivotal in defining both what this arena is like currently and what it could become in the future. Cultural Sociology will publish innovative, sociologically-informed work concerned with cultural processes and artefacts, broadly defined.