From speed dating to stream dating: what do your digital media habits say about you?
Online dating has lost its stigma, and more people are getting comfortable lifecasting personal details about themselves on social networks. One company (Gelatodating) has come up with an innovative approach to virtual matchmaking.
They call it stream dating and the way it works is: your online dating profile is automatically generated from all the information that can be found out about you online in the datastream.
Just imagine…
From your Facebook status updates, to your tweets, your movie rental history at netflix, your musical taste at Last.fm, your book buying at Amazon.com, your online video viewing on YouTube….
All these digital details, clues to your habits, personality, taste—nicely mashed together in an automatically generated dating advertisement.
This is an example of digital intimacy accomplished through data mining.
It is designed to appeal to the super-connected generation of twenty- and thirty-somethings who spent their adolescence on Facebook and who are comfortable getting to know new and old, online and offline friends through the currency of status updates. Of course, the service might appeal to clients beyond the digital native cohort— 1 in 3 Canadian boomers report looking for love online in 2009.
Will this method for creating dating profiles result in more accurate self-representations with fewer virtual exaggerations and digital embellishments? Makes you wonder…would you change your webby ways if you knew a personalized dating composite was being compiled from your Internet history?
Of course if your date seems sketchy or unduly suspicious, yet you don’t have time to dig through their datastream, there’s an app for that. Download the (hugely controversial) free iPhone “Date Check” app and you can run a “sleaze detector” background search (including criminal record check) on your date from your handheld. We’ll call it mobile mate mining.
These emergent forms of computer connected courting are contributing to changing norms of privacy, and expectations of personal disclosure and transparency. Once upon a time, online dating was all about adventures in e-chemistry and the illusive click. Today, fast forward to deep datasync and full digital disclosure.
In related electronic hookup news, flirtexting is the topic of a new study, and it’s also discussed here on cyberpopblog.
Thank you to @montrealmarc for sending me a link about stream dating
