ABSTRACT
Studies show that the majority of love relationships now arise from online matching, whether facilitated by internet sites or dating apps. Love is thus increasingly mediated through technology, but romance and computation have been intertwined for longer than we think. Computer matching of the 1960s gave way in the 2000s to online dating sites vying to find “perfect match” algorithms, while at the same time the algorithmic technology of the perfect match was becoming the basis for widespread recommendation systems. This algorithmic science of attraction has not, however, completely taken over from more established modes of mediated matchmaking, such as reality television, which has long intervened in dating and marriage match-ups but now openly borrows from the discourse of data and predictive analytics to underpin its romantic game play, as in the show Are You the One? (MTV). Where the technology of the perfect match differs from matchmaking media such as television, however, is in the fact that the former peddles in calculable predictive power while the latter revels in love’s unaccountability. These two logics prove to be supplemental rather than contradictory, underlining the love mechanics at the heart of contemporary matching technologies.
