“Where did you find your partner?”, 10-year-old me asked my nanny. And that’s a story I’d love to share. It all started with a newspaper advertisement about a man looking for a girl. Anyone living in Rotterdam that would’ve read the paper could reply by sending a letter to the corresponding address. And my nanny did! And after writing letters for some time, the two eventually met up and eventually got married. Can you believe it? Through an advertisement in the Rotterdam newspaper?!

Dating hasn’t changed, but the way we can reach each other has. Off course there’s still the offline channels such as bars, school, fraternities and study associations where people meet up. Or that one friend that connects you with the other single guy/girl. But huge change came with the rise of the internet (with regards to these channels). Why would you put advertisements in the newspaper if you can find each other online and simply apply filters on age, location, education, hair colour, name it. And so did the people. Whereas the use of these dating platforms always corresponds with some sort of awkwardness, there’s literally no one in my personal bubble of friends who haven’t ever used Tinder. As a matter of fact, Tinder accumulates over 50 million users worldwide today (Iqbal, 2020).

But does a platform such as Tinder actually satisfy the needs of dating? Would my old nanny have actually sent a message to her potential husband if she could have used the channels of today, such as Tinder? I think not! Whereas conversations on Tinder were positively associated with offline Tinder encounters, less than half of the sample reported having had an offline meeting with another Tinder user (Timmermans & Courtois, 2020). Thus, we want to date and meet offline, but we meet online and are somewhat stuck online. Although there are definitely some success stories, why do we find it so hard to go from online chatting to offline dating?

That’s exactly what one high school friend thought off by introducing the dating app Breeze. Why not combine the benefits of the internet, improved channel and filtering options, with the functionality to facilitate offline dating? Consider the business model, it’s brilliant. Instead of having the interactions online, the application provides matchmaking and then pushes both users to meet offline. There’s no online communication at all, just a profile, a match, a date schedular, and a small fee for the first drinks at a restaurant the application provides. If you ask me, this is what online dating is all about, getting offline as soon as possible.

References:

Iqbal M. Tinder revenue and usage statistics (2020). https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tinder-statistics/

Elisabeth Timmermans & Cédric Courtois (2018) From swiping to casual sex and/or committed relationships: Exploring the experiences of Tinder users, The Information Society, 34:2, 59-70, DOI: 10.1080/01972243.2017.1414093

On the 9^th of September, Netflix released a new documentary called “The Social Dilemma”. As I’ve always been a fan and supporter of the developments and (disruptive) innovations that digitization has brought us, another documentary that emphasizes the negative impacts of these unbelievable developments didn’t really excite me. However, what did really get my attention was the fact that the people starring in the documentary, were actually the inside people. Thus, it was definitely worth a watch.

The documentary that is turning out to be one of those ‘must watch’ documentaries, perfectly portrays the dilemma that we’re in. The (*spoiler alert) documentary concludes that the brilliantly designed algorithms of Facebook, Google, Pinterest, and Instagram (and many more) have a huge utopian value, but come with a huge risk of dystopia. Key to the problem is the use and distribution of collected data. With regards to the social media platforms, data mining is not just a tool to create more effectivity in advertising (and thus creating value). By assigning certain content that matches the user’s behaviour, interests, and more, the user becomes more engaged in the network. This has a lot of negative consequences such as the political interference, deep fake’s, and social polarization (Matakos et al., 2017).

The documentary greatly builds up to a sort of negative climax, ultimately stating that we are at the brink of total world destruction. Nuclear war seems peanuts compared to the way social media is developing. Furthermore, the documentary concludes that what we’ve been able to build is absolutely amazing. And I agree! If it wasn’t for the algorithms that the Netflix documentary is warning us for, I probably wouldn’t have watched it!

But did word of mouth attract me to the company that connects people with the movies they love? Or was it Netflix’s algorithmic information processing tool that used their ‘comparable recommendation’ to unconsciously ‘push’ me to watch the documentary?

It just doesn’t make sense? Whereas the recommendation systems in Netflix are working in the same fashion as they do within Amazon, Facebook, Google, Match.com, Microsoft, Twitter, nobody seems to care about Netflix. Even though their very recommendation system operates similarly to the other tech giants, keeping their inner workings “wired shut” with patent and trade secret laws, non-disclosure agreements, non-compete clauses, and other legal instruments (Hallinan & Striphas, 2014). But the way we are engaged to the platform of Netflix to watch the Social Dilemma, regardless of the legitimacy and truth of the content of the documentary, isn’t Netflix also one of those bad guys?

Let’s think about it! Were we able to regulate the data sharing and data usage to an extent that Netflix’s algorithm doesn’t cause polarization? Why are we not concerned in this aspect? Can Netflix be used as a case of successful use of data? Or do we need to worry about the increased engagement that the documentary has lead to?

Bibliography:

Matakos, A., Terzi, E. & Tsaparas, P. Measuring and moderating opinion polarization in social networks. Data Min Knowl Disc 31, 1480–1505 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10618-017-0527-9

Hallinan, B., Striphas, T. – Recommended for you: The Netflix Prize and the production of algorithmic culture. New media & Society (2016). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1461444814538646