E-Lekking: Social Mediation of Social Behavior

This is the second in a series of journal posts exploring an alternative to the messaging model of online dating.

Recent research in the United Kingdom, published in an article entitled "Mobile Phones as Lekking Devices Among Human Males", suggests that there is a lot more to how human beings select and evaluate potential dating partners than the presently established unicast model embraced by online dating would indicate. The Swedish word lek, denoting play (in the sense, of say, Calvinball), is a term used by biologists to describe gregarious display behavior among males of a species.

Although normally invoked in discussions of a various birds, some insects (notably the glass-wing butterfly of South America), fish, and yes, mammals, also exhibit lekking. The key characteristic of lekking, for our purposes, is highlighted by the findings of the UK study: the incidence of cell phone display by (presumptively, heterosexual) males in Liverpool pubs increases as a function of the total number of other males present. The researchers' choice of title tells it all: this behavior is congruent with the display of plumage or other secondary sexual characteristics by males of a variety of species during lekking displays.

Other research points to other behaviors--among men, finding excuses to stretch and flex, with the effect of making oneself look bigger; among women, the stereotyped hair flip, which (subliminally, as verified by slow motion video playback) takes on a momentary appearance reminiscent of a male peacock's plumage--that, I suspect, were the research done, would also be found to increase as a function of the number of potential competitors for romantic attention present in the surrounding environment.

Okay, but what does any of this have to do with dating on the interwebs? You can't casually put your cellphone down on the counter of a virtual bar counter here, and the closest anyone is going to get to a hair flip in this context is an emo profile photo. (Aside: one wonders if the fashion of wearing one's hair in front of one's eyes has increased in recent years as a function of social interactions increasingly reliant on static photos.) Most of human non-verbal communication is simply not transmittable across the Internet, and we just have to live with it, right?

Perhaps. However, I would turn our focus not to specific behaviors, but the structure of relations in which those behaviors occur. The Liverpool study did not find that men engage in display behaviors more often if there are more women in the pub. Rather, this display behavior was correlated with the number of other men present. Again, assuming this was a predominantly heterosexual population, this indicates that how we present ourselves as potential partners in a given social environment is influenced by others in that environment with whom we would not seek partnership.

Yet, the unicast messaging model does not take this into account. Where in real life, human beings are constantly (and non-consciously) evaluating not only potential partners, but also potential competitors for those partners, and subtly altering their behavior accordingly, before any one individual even makes a move to approach any one other individual, in our 19th century "personals" model, the entire dense fabric of social interaction is distilled down to a generic and reified approach behavior. Message into box. Message into box. Message into box.

Of course, this is where the money is.

Except, on OkCupid, that isn't where the money is, because OkC doesn't monetize messaging. This has allowed OkC a lot more freedom in design than traditional pay dating sites. User authored quizzes and questions, journals, forums: each promotes interactions in ways that would be impossible were OkC trying to derive revenue from messaging. Why pay to send a message to someone who might not respond, or to receive a message (C.O.D., as it were) from someone you might not be interested in knowing, if you can just as easily post a message to a public forum that dozens or hundreds might read, author a quiz that will give you data about any number of people who answer in accordance with your own preferences, without paying a red cent?

Yet, these tools, while they provide alternatives to unicast messaging, only begin to approach the true potential of e-lekking. More on that in my next post.