Читать книгу The New Laws of Love - Marie Bergström - Страница 12

To feed and to clothe ourselves, to clean our homes, to nurse our kids and take care of our elderly parents… Over the past decades, we have become accustomed to resorting to private companies for the most intimate activities. When it comes to meeting partners, however, the idea of commercial intermediation was met with aversion for a long time. The dissemination of dating platforms from the 1990s onward corresponds to a progressive “disembedding” of dating. I borrow the term from Karl Polanyi (1944): it refers to a process whereby a series of activities that have previously been embedded in ordinary social relations become detached from society and form an autonomous market sphere.

This extension of capitalism, through the transformation of objects and activities into new products and services, has accelerated remarkably with the new technology. Critics of commodification are correct to point out the growing interconnections between the economy and intimacy. The diversification of technology and the intensification of its uses, which have penetrated so many areas of daily life, have opened up new areas for investment, and private companies are more present than ever in our private lives. Tech entrepreneurs now serve as intermediaries for our social interactions, including the most private ones, for instance communicating with friends and family, sharing photos, coordinating shopping lists and wedding lists, and getting to know people, make new friends, and meet partners and lovers. At the same time, the symbolic boundaries between what is “marketable” and what is “non-marketable” are constantly shifting and spur controversy. As the sociologist Viviana Zelizer observed, economic activity and intimate relations are often thought of as “separate spheres and hostile worlds” with radically different logics, involving rationality on the one hand and emotion on the other, “with inevitable contamination and disorder resulting when the two spheres come into contact with each other” (Zelizer, 2005, pp. 20–21). The expansion of the market into the private sphere has aroused strong fears and is accused of corrupting and “inexorably erod[ing] intimate social ties” (p. 25). The reactions to online dating provide a striking example of these tensions caused by the incursion of private actors into the sphere of intimacy.

Before jumping to the conclusion that intimate relations have somehow been taken over by commodification and rationalization, a key distinction must be made between online dating as an industry – which involves private companies trying to sell their services – and online dating as a practice – that is, how the platforms are used. The market mechanisms ruling the industry do not necessarily and automatically carry over into user practices. Conflating the two would on the one hand lead to a mechanical and deterministic reading of social behavior and, on the other hand, fail to recognize the autonomy of the market. To avoid these pitfalls, I have devoted a specific analysis to the economy of online dating. Despite growing concerns over the role of capitalist market forces in our private lives, there has been surprisingly little academic interest in the companies that operate in the sphere of privacy. This is the case with online dating, where the “market” metaphor, used to describe romantic and sexual interactions, has drawn attention away from the actual marketplace – the actors who create these products, their work, and the norms governing their business (Wilken et al., 2019; Pidoux et al., 2021). The first aim of the book is therefore to pry open the black box of the online dating industry.

The main goal is, nonetheless, to investigate the consequences for users. The disembedding of dating means bypassing ordinary social relations in the search for a partner. With digital platforms, dating becomes a private matter.