Ghosts in the Dating App Machine

Virality, Algorithms, and Capitalism
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-54137-2
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 176 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 453 g

Reihe: Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture

Ghosts in the Dating App Machine offers a critical examination of the shift to dating apps to illustrate key features of a broader shift to a mode of “data” colonialism based on datafication and AI orchestration.

This book analyses 48 in-depth and mediated interviews, forums, blogs, and official statements made by dating apps. It situates this transition within the broader culture of data colonialism through close readings of science fiction, suggesting the world has become like Us, where doppelgangers constituted from reprehensible proclivities have emerged as digital profiles reflected back to users through the horrific play of social media mirrors to govern their encounters against their wishes. These mirrors allow media companies to conduct surreptitious experiments on users’ dispossessed desires, devise digital doppelgangers from those they disavow, and compel behaviors that are lucrative precisely because they are misaligned with humane values. Yet this horrific play of mirrors is not inevitable. By attending to the ghosts of colonialism unleashed by media companies through the approach developed in this book, it is still possible to galvanize the collective will to combat data colonialism and strive to create a world where love disentangled from colonial modes of desire is possible.

This study will interest scholars attempting to understand the rapidly evolving ecology of dating apps, within the areas of digital media, media sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, and media and communication studies.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Narr, Gregory

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Mediensoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Kommunikationswissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Introduction

Part 1: Summoning ghosts

2. Feeling ghosts

3. The ghost of coloniality

Part 2: OkCupid’s ghost

4. OkCupid’s entrepreneurs of intimacy

5. OkCupid’s algorithmic imaginary

Part 3: Virality machines

6. The swipe virus

7. Turing’s ghost

Part 4: Dating app ghosts

8. The uncanny swipe drive

9. Bored ghosts and anxious text games

Part 5: Ghosts in the virality machine

10. One-way funhouse mirrors

Appendix: methods

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Gregory Narr has researched and taught at CUNY, USA and Harvard University, USA including classes on online dating and social media.