Contributed by: ElyseRomano on Wednesday, March 13 2013 @ 09:01 am
Last modified on
Dan Slater is causing quite a stir these days. You may remember his article for The Atlantic - "A Million First Dates: How Online Dating is Threating Monogamy" - and the ripple of strong reactions it inspired. Whether or not you agree with Slater's argument, you can't argue that it had an impact.
If one little article could achieve all that, what could a book do? Slater will soon find out. His new book, Love in the Time of Algorithms: What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating, has arrived and is already generating interest.
In an interview[*1] with USA Today, Slater theorized about the impact of online dating on modern relationships. "It's the vast expansion of the dating pool," he said. "Everyone has access to so many more people than they were accustomed to in the past. I started to wonder how that might affect how people approach their relationship lives."
Slater believes that more options mean less commitment, because commitment is based, in part, on the availability of other choices. Online dating gives users more options than they could ever want or need, leading them to move more quickly from one relationship to the next. And though they may be getting more dates by going online, they may not necessarily be getting better ones.
"As far as the algorithms go," says Slater, "and the compatibility and ability of algorithms to predict compatibility between two people, what my reporting and research showed was that psychological science has not provided the ability to predict long-term compatibility between a couple who have never met."
Slater's thoughts on online dating come from a unique point of view: he is the child of parents who met through the second ever computer dating system, invented in 1965. The first computer-based dating program was launched in the 1950s. In its earliest stages, digital dating required participants to fill in the bubbles of a written questionnaire that resembled the SAT response sheet.
After submitting your response sheet and a $3 or $4 subscription fee, your answers were fed through a computer that returned 6 possible matches. The matches were then mailed out and it was up to the individuals to initiate contact.
The process was nowhere near as complex as today's matching algorithms, which still have plenty of room for improvement. But though it's not a perfect system, and he clearly has reservations about it, Slater has hope for online dating.
"I think what is happening at the moment is that dating sites are getting better at predicting whether two people who never met can hit it off on a first date," he told[*2] Katie Couric on her talk show. "And I think the more data that dating sites accumulate, the better they'll become at matching people up."