Читать книгу The New Laws of Love - Marie Bergström - Страница 18

There are thousands of marriageable men and women of all ages capable of making each other happy, who never have a chance of meeting… Therefore, the desirability of having some organ through which ladies and gentlemen aspiring to marriage can be honorably brought into communication is too obvious to need a demonstration.

The Matrimonial News and Special Advertiser, October 1877

Our mission is to create new connections and bring the world closer together and help people meet others they otherwise wouldn’t have met.

Tinder, February 2017

Today’s dating sites and apps were born with the internet, but they can trace their distant origins to personal advertisements and forms of marriage brokerage that developed in the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. These early forms of commercial matchmaking have survived until today, but were supplemented in the 1980s by digital dating services such as the bulletin board systems (BBSs) in North America and the Minitel in France. Each of these services is a child of its time. They bear the mark of the sexual norms and matrimonial system they operated in, but also those of the economic and technical environment of their time. The spread is often tied to technological innovations, beginning with industrial printing, which made classified advertising popular, then moving on to early digital technologies, which spurred “computer dating” and the first online dating networks, and finally to the World Wide Web and mobile technology, with the websites and apps familiar to us today.

Many similarities can be found between these different types of dating services. The companies that operated in earlier forms of matchmaking were often the first to invest in new markets, hence features from older services have been passed on and adapted to new platforms. The filiation is noticeable not only in the production but also in the reception of dating services, as arguments directed against them can be found from time to time. The contemporary view that online dating has commodified intimate relations echoes a nineteenth-century outcry against matrimonial agencies and personal ads for turning marriage into a market. On the basis of work carried out by European and American historians and through an analysis of press archives, this chapter traces the origins of online dating. It shows that many features of these platforms and many debates around them, all considered radically new, are curiously similar to those features and debates found in their ancestors, sometimes 150 years old.