E-Lekking: The Limits of the Messaging Model

I've been comment stalking about this for a while now, and decided that it finally deserved its own post.

Recent new feature changes on OkCupid have brought into sharp relief a profound weakness of the current implementation of online dating and matchmaking Web sites. Specifically, the traffic light system (which marks each user's profile and search listing in accordance with some unfathomable formula that determines whether said user replies "often", "selectively" or "very selectively") and a default notice (replacing, it would seem, the traffic light) identifying and bringing attention to users who have not received any messages through OkC in a seven day period.

Although some users have expressed appreciation for these bells and whistles, both features have been openly criticized by users as unwarranted and stigmatizing (with said stigma attaching not only to the "no messages" flag, but also to both red lights and green lights, for different reasons). These widgets have also been indicted on grounds of their being implemented in a manner that exposes personal information about user's messaging behavior, to anyone willing to view the underlying HTML.

My own criticism of these features is that they recapitulate a model of personals advertising inherited from print newspapers, carried through to telephone-based dating services, and adopted essentially unchanged by Internet dating sites. Namely, an architecture of communication consisting of a box into whichmessages are delivered. (I shall leave the potential erotic undertones of this, especially in light of the historicity of gender relations it articulates, for others to develop.)

Here, social interactions are atomized into dyadic transactions, between a lone sender and a lone receiver. Where more than one message may be delivered to a box, each sender is isolated from and essentially oblivious to peers. Likewise, each recipient is conceived of as a self-sufficient rational actor, without any need for or recourse to the feedback or prospective judgments that peers might provide. Rather than leverage evolving technology to extend the capacities of human beings as denizens of dynamic social groups, instead these systems thrust individuals into an awkward and facile intimacy.

Now, it is not terribly surprising that this one-to-one (i.e., unicast) communication protocol would have been established in the first place, nor that it has survived as long as it has across changing media technologies. It is, after all, a structural scheme very amenable to monetizing. If you have any doubts of this, take a look at any professional matchmaking service, with its spiral bound notebooks of photos and profiles, or even a modern speed-dating event. For each, profitably facilitating one-to-onerendezvous is their raison d'être.

However, OkCupid is not deriving money from arranging these message-to-box interactions. There are neither fees to maintain a mailbox, nor charges associated with sending messages or reading them upon their receipt. One might even argue that the newest site design is sub-optimal for driving advertising revenue as a function of messaging. One's home screen has an advertisement in the center right of the page, an eye-catching position hard to miss when reviewing and toggling through event feeds immediately to its left. On the other hand, when reading a message in one's mailbox, the advertising banner is at the top of the page, lost to scroll before it even loads properly, when reviewing any but the most brief of threaded exchanges.

Why, then, are the OkCupid boffins installing traffic control signals and neon vacancy signs to encourage messaging? Why are they focusing on an aspect of technology-facilitated dating that hasn't changed since the 19th century?

Perhaps it is merely that we as a culture have been doing this for so long, we find it difficult to imagine doing it any other way?

In my next journal post, I will explore an alternative approach to thinking about this issue, and begin presenting ideas for what OkCupid (or that which comes after OkC) might do to take Internet dating, and social networking, more generally, in an entirely different direction.