Online dating mcdonaldization

Contents:
  1. The Artificiality of Dating in the Virtual Realm
  2. Post Digital Network
  3. McDonaldization of Online Dating Essay
  4. Online Dating - The McDonaldization of love? by Carl Prest on Prezi

They compensate for the lack of physical signals required during face-to-face interaction. This impersonal nature of online dating brings me to second point on how online dating has resulted in an artificial way of looking for a partner and hence starting a relationship. The emergence of online dating has also made relationships seem more artificial. Prior to online dating, a couple found it hard to exaggerate their physical attractiveness or personalities in the absence of a technological barrier, leaving no room for deceiving the partner.

In other words, the perceptions that both individuals in the couple had of each other were more immutable.

The Artificiality of Dating in the Virtual Realm

Likewise, the online dating world dictates the kind of information that the individual would want to disclose about himself. This disclosure is facilitated by the fact that individuals may reinvent their self-presentation after it has been posted. With the emergence of online dating, the absence of face-to-face interaction between two daters means they can exaggerate key information such as their height to enhance their attractiveness. This deception in presentation provides an artificial basis for starting a relationship as individuals use the abovementioned information that can be false to select a partner.

Furthermore, information on online dating sites such as photos can be constantly edited. In suggesting a nature of communication between an online couple that is artificial, one must not forget that online couples do eventually meet offline.

Post Digital Network

This would suggest that relationships that have their origins in online communication may not be artificial if the relationship transits to the offline arena and hence is free from the artificial online world of dating. The fact that couples would want to meet offline due to the impressions that they have of each other shows an attempt to continue the relationship, making it all the more sincere and genuine. However, while the transition from online dating to offline interaction may make a relationship less artificial and more personal, arbitrary indicators that couples have used online such as job occupation to get to know one another make the basis of a relationship artificial.

Rather, the dearth of non-verbal cues evident in computer-mediated communication makes it difficult for one to establish a personal identity. Hence it would be difficult for two individuals to establish a human connection in the online dating world. Compounding the artificial nature of these indicators is the fact that individuals may have gone through a comprehensive process of filtering out less attractive choices for a partner rather than focusing on one person.

This filtering out of less attractive options brings me to my final point on how relationships have become commoditized with the advent of online dating. The emergence of online dating has led to a commoditization of relationships whereby relationships act as an outcome of a successful marketing strategy by two individuals.

The key differences to note between the times before the emergence of online dating and after are the mechanisms used to find a suitable partner and the existence of a wider availability of a mating pool. Before the emergence of online dating, the mechanism used to find a suitable partner was much more inter-personal in nature where mutual friends and the like would introduce a potential partner in a common social setting.

As the nature of online dating transcends geographies, there is also a wider market available for individuals to find potential partners who share similar passions and goals. This in turn has led to relationships being commoditized as individuals seek to present the best possible version of themselves while at the same time looking for a potential partner that possesses the desired qualities. The wide array of online profiles has also meant that individuals can simply forego the less appealing profiles and move on to a more appealing one.

Above all, it is the impersonal nature of online dating that has made a relationship comparable to a commodity as people are assessed based on arbitrary data rather than character. George Ritzer views McDonaldization as a formal rationalization of life where the values of the fast-food industry such as efficiency, control through non-human technology and calculability have seeped into areas of life such as the family.

Online dating itself is a concrete example of the formal rationalization of life. It takes time to make a good hamburger, much like it takes time to form a good relationship.

McDonaldization of Online Dating Essay

Hypothetically speaking, if you are hungry and seeking a hamburger you have two options, a fast food or a sit down restaurant. Also, when you go to a drive-thru you are missing the experience of dining out, like how if you spend your dating years behind a computer, you are missing out on the experience of going out into the world and meeting new people and trying new things.

Online dating websites operate in a similar fashion. These companies are showing thousands of potential singles to each other everyday, and like fast-food, these results are usually low-quality and the same thing over and over again.


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However, these dating websites are making a significant profit due to monthly membership fees and money from advertising, when what they are doing is nothing more the serving up the same bland results time after time. The advertisements that you see for these websites include statistics about how an increasing number of marriages today are started on the internet. What these companies fail to mention is how the divorce rate in America right now is tragically high.

She discusses the many factors of such a high divorce rates, such as, the economy and also mentions the fact that this can be caused due to people rushing into relationships. Online dating makes it incredibly easy to meet people quickly, thus rushing into relationships, and ultimately, shortening the lifespan of such relationships. Tamara Afifi also goes on to explain the high costs of divorces and how lawyers benefit from this.

Additionally, there are new websites where you can get a divorce online since it is so common today, making it fast and convenient, with little human interacting. The people behind dating websites are trying to run a company and are focused on making money.

McDonaldization of Dating end

In her piece, The Price of Love, Emi Berry explains how dating websites care nothing more than the profit they receive from people looking for love. Money can, however, help find that love you seek via a dating service. They are looking to get as much revenue as they can as fast as they can. They have essentially created a conveyer-belt method for getting single individuals into relationships, and at the end of the day, they are just people trying to run a company. Low quality, unhappy and unsatisfying marriages are being more visible due to Internet dating sites.

The same principles can apply to dating profiles. The beautiful thing about the internet is that you can show people looking at your profile all of your best qualities, while hiding your less desirable ones, thus making people seem much more appealing online.

Online Dating - The McDonaldization of love? by Carl Prest on Prezi

When couples from online dating websites meeting in real life, they may not be all the seemed to be online. However, people might try to make things works because they believe that the person they are meeting in real life is just as great as the one they met online, only to be disappointed later on when they are not all they turned out to be.

However, is all online dating necessarily bad? You hear many success stories on television, as well as real life, and theres a positive and negative side to most things. In the case of online dating, all you really hear about in the media is the good and happy relationships that come out of this new technology. What they fail to mention is the disappointment, short-term relationships, and they large amounts of money that people are spending on these websites to be connected with people.

Yes, it is true that these websites allow you meet people you may not have ever met without them, as well as match you with people who the website feels you would be compatible with. When you meet someone in person there is a connection that you get that is unlike anything else that can be felt through a computer screen. This just makes you think, how long is this going to keep going on until human interaction is completely obsolete? So at the end of the day, we are living in a modern world, one where McDonaldization is inevitably taking over the way that most organizations are run.

This process is making the world more technological, and computerizing everything. You have to ask yourself, when is it too far?


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