The New Laws of Love. Marie Bergström

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Название The New Laws of Love
Автор произведения Marie Bergström
Жанр Кинематограф, театр
Серия
Издательство Кинематограф, театр
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781509543533



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respectively. In addition to a place for posting “bios,” they offered a matching system. New users completed an online questionnaire with some fifty closed and open-ended questions primarily concerning sex, age, sexual orientation, physical appearance, occupation, values, hobbies, and personality. Once the form was completed, it was compared automatically with other users’ responses, with the help of an algorithm programmed to find a compatible partner. Compatibility was determined by the number of identical responses, and the new user could browse through a list of “suitable” partners and send them private messages (Scharlott and Christ, 1995).

      The history of the Minitel and its erotic chat services is very different. Unlike the BBSs, the Minitel was a project entirely designed, owned, and operated by the French state; and the venture was driven by a different ideology. The system was initially conceived of as a vertical broadcast information tool, which was to provide the French population with official news and services (phone book, weather broadcasts, train schedules, etc.). The state operator never envisioned the messaging services; that feature came about only because someone hacked the system. In 1982, in the eastern city of Strasbourg, the daily newspaper Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace set up a local videotex news service called Gretel. Because Gretel subscribers were having trouble connecting, the newspaper’s computer manager set up a chat service as a temporary way to communicate with them. Users soon hijacked the system and began communicating with one another. The newspaper declined to interfere, and this mode of communicating was an instant success. Gretel would become France’s first messagerie conviviale (Marchand and Ancelin, 1984).

      In the 1980s, a large number of governmental, academic, and business computer networks operating in the United States were gradually integrated into the “network of networks” that became the internet. Its rapid success was largely attributable to the development in the 1990s of web technologies that allowed easy access to online content. Dating sites were among the first interactive platforms to launch on the web, well before the first social media site, which appeared in 1997 (boyd and Ellison, 2007). Although a product of the web, the dating sites bore traces of earlier dating services, in relation to which they marked an evolution, not a revolution.

      In September 1995 Wired, then a young magazine covering technology, published an article on what it described as a company “offering an interactive digital personals service.”1 The service was Match.com, considered to be the first online dating site, and was created by Electric Classifieds Inc., a company that sold ads on the internet. Using the conventional headings of columns of classifieds in newspapers, the company launched a series of sites with the domain names Jobs.com, Autos.com, and Housing.com, as well as a separate site for dating called Match.com (Figure 1.5). As the founder explained in a 2011 interview, “[t]hat was the original idea, to do classified ads but make it electric.”2

      The inheritance from older services was visible in the architecture of the new platforms. Both the messageries and the BBSs inherited parts of their organization from agencies and personals, and passed that legacy on to the dating sites. The most striking example is the “bio,” a free-text self-portrait that forms a genre in its own right, in a style used only in dating services. This specific autobiographical format was employed from the very beginning of personal ads in the nineteenth century (Garden, 2008), then moved to BBS and Minitel chat services (Fornel, 1989), and can still be found in today’s online dating profiles.