Ghosts in the Dating App Machine offers a critical examination of the shift to dating apps to illustrate key features of a broader shift to a mode of “data” colonialism based on datafication and AI orchestration.
This book analyses 48 in-depth and mediated interviews, forums, blogs, and official statements made by dating apps. It situates this transition within the broader culture of data colonialism through close readings of science fiction, suggesting the world has become like Us, where doppelgangers constituted from reprehensible proclivities have emerged as digital profiles reflected back to users through the horrific play of social media mirrors to govern their encounters against their wishes. These mirrors allow media companies to conduct surreptitious experiments on users’ dispossessed desires, devise digital doppelgangers from those they disavow, and compel behaviors that are lucrative precisely because they are misaligned with humane values. Yet this horrific play of mirrors is not inevitable. By attending to the ghosts of colonialism unleashed by media companies through the approach developed in this book, it is still possible to galvanize the collective will to combat data colonialism and strive to create a world where love disentangled from colonial modes of desire is possible.
This study will interest scholars attempting to understand the rapidly evolving ecology of dating apps within the areas of digital media, media sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, and media and communication studies.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction
Part 1: Summoning ghosts
2. Feeling ghosts
3. The ghost of coloniality
Part 2: OkCupid’s ghost
4. OkCupid’s entrepreneurs of intimacy
5. OkCupid’s algorithmic imaginary
Part 3: Virality machines
6. The swipe virus
7. Turing’s ghost
Part 4: Dating app ghosts
8. Uncanny swipe drive
9. Bored ghosts and anxious text games
Part 5: Ghosts in the virality machine
10. One-way funhouse mirrors
11. Conclusion
Appendix: methods
Index
About the Author :
Gregory Narr has researched and taught at CUNY, USA, and Harvard University, USA, including classes on online dating and social media.
Review :
"There is no more important space of freedom than love, and nowhere today do extractivism's hidden forces mine deeper than on dating apps. Greg Narr in this theoretically rich and sharply critical study of contemporary dating platforms adds an essential dimension to our understanding of data colonialism. Highly recommended."
-- Nick Couldry, Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
"Ghosts in the dating app machine is an indispensable read for the way it addresses the fundamental shift in the social and the transformation of the subject of desire brought with the ongoing development of AI. It will entice its readers with its provocative call for change and the evocative approach it develops to do so."
-- Patricia Ticineto Clough, Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies, Queens College, CUNY, USA
