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

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Description

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 todays most popular web applications.

Reviews

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, James Madison University
Building Relationships contributes to the study of digital rhetoric by focusing on both digital identity performance and the role of the underlying algorithmsas coupled with user experience and design choicesof 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, George Mason University
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, University of Toronto

Author Bio

Dawn Shepherd is assistant professor of English and associate director of the first-year writing program at Boise State University.