Читать книгу The New Laws of Love - Marie Bergström - Страница 21

The first experiments with “computer dating” (Figure 1.2) date back to the late 1950s, when students at Harvard and Stanford used punch cards to match candidates for dates (Gillmor, 2007; Sprecher et al., 2008). A similar arrangement was adopted for scientific purposes in the 1960s, when social psychologists were investigating the factors at work in interpersonal attraction, one of the discipline’s pet topics at the time (Coombs and Kenkel, 1966; Byrne et al., 1970). Researchers programmed the computers to match men and women according to a predetermined formula, established on the basis of data from questionnaires, physical attractiveness scales, and personality tests. Dates were arranged and subsequently evaluated after participants submitted their satisfaction questionnaires. The system was also marketed by marriage agencies; one of the earliest to specialize in computer matchmaking was the Scientific Marriage Foundation, which had started business in 1957 (Joyce and Baker, 2008). The agencies introduced men and women who were found compatible in terms of preferences and personality traits, and also homogamous about age, ethnicity, social and occupational status, and religion (Sindberg et al., 1972). Some thirty years later, such experiments were carried over into the automatic matching arrangements available on different forms of computer networks.

Figure 1.2. Newspaper publicity for the “computer dating” agency Compatibility (LIFE, August 1969)

When new technologies were introduced in the 1980s, the matching services made great strides. Computers in the United States were networking since the late 1960s, but it was only with the expansion of microcomputing in the 1980s and the introduction of BBSs that online communications would become commonplace. Anyone with a personal computer and a dial-up modem could access a bulletin board and send messages to other users. Some of these services would rapidly specialize in dating (see Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3. Interface of the BBS Matchmaker

Two of the BBS dating services that attracted the greatest media coverage were Dial Your Match and Matchmaker, which went online in 1981 and 1986 respectively. In addition to a place for posting “bios,” they offered a matching system. New users completed an online questionnaire with some fifty closed and open-ended questions primarily concerning sex, age, sexual orientation, physical appearance, occupation, values, hobbies, and personality. Once the form was completed, it was compared automatically with other users’ responses, with the help of an algorithm programmed to find a compatible partner. Compatibility was determined by the number of identical responses, and the new user could browse through a list of “suitable” partners and send them private messages (Scharlott and Christ, 1995).

France developed a national network approximately at the same time. Users accessed a videotex system using a terminal called Minitel – a name that would ultimately come to refer to the whole network. One of the most popular features of the Minitel was that of “friendly messaging systems” (messageries conviviales). By the late 1980s, these chat services accounted for the lion’s share of the networks’ data traffic (excluding business applications), and by the mid-1990s there were some 800 platforms in France (Rincé, 1990; Jouët, 2011). The messaging services (messageries) were mainly operated by newspaper and magazine publishers and given names such as “Jane” and “Aline” (these two were run by the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur), “Turlu” (slang for telephone; run by the daily Libération), and “Union” (the name of an erotic magazine; run by Hachette). Many of them where of a sexual character. As Josiane Jouët’s research shows, a lot of people used the messaging services as a forum for explicitly sexual discussions, where users could flirt and air their fantasies without necessarily meeting in person (Jouët, 1987). Although the Minitel system was not used solely for this purpose, it was to be remembered mostly for its erotic content (see Figure 1.4).

Figure 1.4. Interface of the Minitel messaging system ULLA

The reactions to North America’s BBSs and France’s messageries were totally different, in spite of the similarities between the two. In the United States, the growth of online communication was largely idealized and welcomed as a positive social change. The network’s structure was seen as a horizontal universe; this is how it appeared both to its designers – academics and data scientists who were also its main users – and to the media that reported on its development (Flichy, 2001; Turner, 2010). This “digital utopianism,” as Fred Turner described it, largely extended to the BBS dating services, which were also seen in a positive light. Print journalists and academics heralded BBSs as profoundly “democratic” platforms that allowed interactions to be unaffected by individuals’ age, sex, social background, handicaps, or other social characteristics. Users would be able to judge each other on the basis of values, ideas, and personality rather than physical appearance, and would be freer to express their desires. The enthusiasm carried over to the explicitly sexual platforms, which were lauded for being egalitarian.

The history of the Minitel and its erotic chat services is very different. Unlike the BBSs, the Minitel was a project entirely designed, owned, and operated by the French state; and the venture was driven by a different ideology. The system was initially conceived of as a vertical broadcast information tool, which was to provide the French population with official news and services (phone book, weather broadcasts, train schedules, etc.). The state operator never envisioned the messaging services; that feature came about only because someone hacked the system. In 1982, in the eastern city of Strasbourg, the daily newspaper Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace set up a local videotex news service called Gretel. Because Gretel subscribers were having trouble connecting, the newspaper’s computer manager set up a chat service as a temporary way to communicate with them. Users soon hijacked the system and began communicating with one another. The newspaper declined to interfere, and this mode of communicating was an instant success. Gretel would become France’s first messagerie conviviale (Marchand and Ancelin, 1984).

As an interactive tool grafted onto a top-down information service – and, what is more, as a tool used for a sexual purpose – the Minitel messaging was seen as “a perversion of the intrinsic rationality of the system,” according to Josiane Jouët (2011). The official ideology behind the Minitel made it difficult to portray erotic chats in any positive light. A slew of highly critical books and articles denounced a new form of hedonism, caused by sexual frustration, excessive individualism, and, once again, the commodification of human relations. Whereas digital utopianism created a glowing image for North American BBSs, France’s Minitel services were criticized for their double transgression – sexual and technological.

In the 1980s, a large number of governmental, academic, and business computer networks operating in the United States were gradually integrated into the “network of networks” that became the internet. Its rapid success was largely attributable to the development in the 1990s of web technologies that allowed easy access to online content. Dating sites were among the first interactive platforms to launch on the web, well before the first social media site, which appeared in 1997 (boyd and Ellison, 2007). Although a product of the web, the dating sites bore traces of earlier dating services, in relation to which they marked an evolution, not a revolution.