Love, The Internet and Algorithms - Wall Street Journal
By Ben Rooney
Has the internet really revolutionized love? Or rather has it changed the way we find our life partner (for the lucky these two overlap)?.
In true New Yorker style, writer Nick Paumgarten has conducted an in depth look at the increasingly crowded field of online dating sites.
Where once all you had to do, as a woman, was pick from three pictures of men and say which you preferred “in camp chopping wood, in a studio painting a canvas, or in a garage working a pillar drill,” now, according to Mr. Paumgarten, Match.com, one of the world’s largest dating sites uses 1,500 variables and a finely-tuned algorithm to find your perfect partner.
The whole online dating industry, and it is an industry, is built on the premise (and promise) that the love is out there, and the internet will find it.
The process of selecting and securing a partner, whether for conceiving and rearing children, or for enhancing one’s socioeconomic standing, or for attempting motel-room acrobatics, or merely for finding companionship in a cold and lonely universe, is as consequential as it can be inefficient or irresolute. Lives hang in the balance, and yet we have typically relied for our choices on happenstance—offhand referrals, late nights at the office, or the dream of meeting cute.
Online dating sites, whatever their more mercenary motives, draw on the premise that there has got to be a better way. They approach the primeval mystery of human attraction with a systematic and almost Promethean hand. They rely on algorithms, those often proprietary mathematical equations and processes which make it possible to perform computational feats beyond the reach of the naked brain.
It is a great—if rather long (it is The New Yorker after all)—read.
The New Yorker: Looking for someone
Has the internet really revolutionized love? Or rather has it changed the way we find our life partner (for the lucky these two overlap)?.
In true New Yorker style, writer Nick Paumgarten has conducted an in depth look at the increasingly crowded field of online dating sites.
Where once all you had to do, as a woman, was pick from three pictures of men and say which you preferred “in camp chopping wood, in a studio painting a canvas, or in a garage working a pillar drill,” now, according to Mr. Paumgarten, Match.com, one of the world’s largest dating sites uses 1,500 variables and a finely-tuned algorithm to find your perfect partner.
The whole online dating industry, and it is an industry, is built on the premise (and promise) that the love is out there, and the internet will find it.
The process of selecting and securing a partner, whether for conceiving and rearing children, or for enhancing one’s socioeconomic standing, or for attempting motel-room acrobatics, or merely for finding companionship in a cold and lonely universe, is as consequential as it can be inefficient or irresolute. Lives hang in the balance, and yet we have typically relied for our choices on happenstance—offhand referrals, late nights at the office, or the dream of meeting cute.
Online dating sites, whatever their more mercenary motives, draw on the premise that there has got to be a better way. They approach the primeval mystery of human attraction with a systematic and almost Promethean hand. They rely on algorithms, those often proprietary mathematical equations and processes which make it possible to perform computational feats beyond the reach of the naked brain.
It is a great—if rather long (it is The New Yorker after all)—read.
The New Yorker: Looking for someone
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