21ST Century Dating : A Biosocial Ecological Approach to Online Dating (original) (raw)
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With the increasing dissemination and usage of online mate choice, finding a partner via the Internet has attracted remarkable public attention in the last decade. Several, mostly negative prejudices toward online mate choice-especially regarding its risks and disadvantages-circulate constantly throughout the mass media and form public perceptions. This article presents common stereotypes on this (still) new phenomenon, derived from an investigation of newspapers online and offline, online guides, blogs, and discussion forums and confronts them with the empirical facts. Based on several descriptive analyses, we discuss whether and to what extent ten prevalent beliefs correspond to the empirical reality of finding a mate via the Internet in Germany.
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Nigeria is one of the biggest and fastest growing telecom markets in Africa, attracting huge amounts of foreign investment, and is yet standing at very low levels of market penetration. The mobile sector, shared by four operators, has seen triple-digit growth rates every year since competition has been introduced. The transformation of Nigeria’s telecommunications landscape since the licensing of three GSM networks in 2001 and a fourth one in 2002 has been nothing short of astounding. The country continues to be one of the fastest growing markets in Africa with triple-digit growth rates almost every single year since 2001. It surpassed Egypt and Morocco in 2004 to become the continent’s second largest mobile market after South Africa (http://www.internetworldstats.com/af/ng.htm). And yet it has only reached about one quarter of its estimated ultimate market potential. Giving details of the current internet penetration in Nigeria, the Director General of National Information Technology Development Agency, Cleopas Angaye said that the Nigeria internet population witnessed tremendous growth with a boost from 2,418,679 users in 2005 to an estimated number of about 10 million users in 2008 and currently over 44 million internet users, thereby, positioning Nigeria as one of the fastest growing internet users in sub-Saharan Africa (thisdaylive, 2012). According to Bargh and McKenna (2004), the internet is but the latest in a series of technological advances that have changed the world in fundamental ways. One of these advances is cyber dating. In Nigeria today, young adults are adventurous and proactive in heterosexual encounters through the new technology of internet. Cyber dating is a channel for this exercise starting with online gossiping (Oluwole, 2009). Also, so many male adolescents are proving their masculinity (Oluwole, 2010) by foraging into the virtual space pretending as adults. Cyber dating is one of the several benefits of internet technology. However, as good as this innovation is, there are several conceptions, misconceptions and dangers of cyber dating. This is the focus of this paper.
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As a socio-technical phenomenon, online dating has significant appeal to researchers interested in various aspects of human-computer interaction – presentation of self in online environments; norms of disclosure and deception; and the extent to which technological design informs dynamics of human relationships. With these many facets of socio-technical practice come important and complex methodological questions, where both the sensitivity of the topic and the specific technologies being studied can introduce practical and ethical obstacles. This panel brings together scholars across human computer interaction, communication, information studies, and Internet studies to examine methodological issues that have arisen in their own work on online dating, with the objective of broadening these issues of ethics and methods to the wider CSCW community.
Zeitschrift Fur Familienforschung, 2011
Online dating has evolved from a rare and stigmatised medium to a socially accepted way of partnership formation and to a lucrative business model at the same time. Current key capital market data on digital dating services amounts to a market volume of 138 million euros in Germany, 932 million dollars in the United States, and an amount of four billion US dollars worldwide. This economic dimension is associated with massive advertising campaigns, increasing media discourse and the increasing relevance of online dating in contemporary couple formation. The success of online dating essentially stems from the simple and effective access to mating platforms. Online dating is increasingly displacing the traditional necessity of the actor’s co-presence as online interactions take place in relative independence of time and space: men and women can easily integrate their dating activities into their daily lives with marginal time loss. The structure of dating sites allows for simultaneous ...
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The most important aspect of online dating is the messaging. Resting upon that corollary, this project discursively analyzes naturally-occurring interactions between users on two online dating sites. Current facework, relationship initiation, and online dating research lacks a systematic understanding of the conversational processes involved in establishing a relationship online. This thesis addresses that deficit of understanding. Results show that there is a sequence and a set of resources that online dating users draw upon to get acquainted; suggesting a new typology of opening gambits based on technological affordances. Results also show that users openly negotiate the process of relationship initiation, discussing both the interaction situation and their performances. Overall, this investigation provides insights that give researchers and online dating users a deeper and more complete understanding of the work that is done on a turn-by-turn, conversational level in the online dance of courtship.