I, myself, have never experienced an online relationship. While I feel that the medium of cyber space is beneficial in facilitating many examples of communication, I personally feel as though dating and building relationships is something that should be done face-to-face, in a non-mediated medium. Nonetheless, I am fascinated by relationships that have been able to grow and prosper online.
Rather than write about my non-existent experiences with online dating, I decided to discover those of others in the media. I began by searching “online dating” on nytimes.com and was quite surprised by the number of wedding announcements referencing that the couples met online.
Aside from the abundance of wedding announcements that chronicled the experiences of couples that met their matches online, there were also a number of in-depth features on the failures of online dating sites. An article written on Sept. 30, 2007, quotes 33-year-old Jennifer Silver, who stated that she had a number of terrible experiences with dating services such as JDate and Match.com. According to Silver, people were very dishonest on their profiles and often did not bear any resemblance to they image they portrayed on their profile.
A second article, written in Dec. 2004, cited how the online dating industry had began to plateau due to a number of instances in which people lied about their identity. Allison Gold, quoted in the article, likened her initial experiences with online dating to being a kid in the candy store, where there are a number of great options to choose from. However, Gold soon found that when she met the men she thought were going to be straight out of Ocean’s Eleven, they were nothing like she thought they were going to be like. She said she felt “jerked around”, after being lead to believe she was finding a perfect match, when in reality the men had lied about their appearance, career, or marital status.
Such experiences support the SIDE and Hyperpersonal theories and reject the SIP and URT theories. Both SIDE and Hyperpersonal predict negative outcomes of relationships that begin online and then leave virtuality. SIDE attributes negative outcomes to the fact that face-to-face interaction fosters individuation and differentiation, which weaken social attraction. Hyperpersonal, however, states that inflated perceptions developed online detract from social attraction when the relationship leaves virtuality. Both theories provide accurate explanations for the experiences of both Silver and Gold, who, upon meeting online dates in real life, were turned off by the inaccurate self-descriptions provided online.
Cited articles:
Williams, A. (2004, Dec. 12). E-dating bubble springs a leak. The New York Times.
Fischler, M.S. (2007, Sept. 30). Online dating putting you off? Try a matchmaker. The New York Times.
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Hi you!
Overall, great post! It was extremely thought-provoking, and online dating is something I too am very interested in. You did a fantastic job finding relevant articles, and an even better job relating the theories discussed in class to them.
As mentioned before, the articles you found are very interesting, yet sometimes, online dating does work out. My cousin met his now wife in a Mets Baseball AOL chat room, and their mixed-mode relationship is perfectly aligned with the SIP theory. After speaking for over a year through CMC, they met in person, and neither one were shocked as to what the other were like. In fact, they felt like they had a fully accurate picture of one another. This fits with Walther’s Social Information Processing Theory where alhough the exchange of social information is slower via CMC than face-to-face, over time the relationships formed are not weaker or more fragile.
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