Building Relationships

Building Relationships uses an apparatus approach to media analysis in order to determine whether the synchronic logic of online dating is compatible with the historically diachronic logic of marriage.

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Matchmaking is a tradition as old as marriage itself, and the activities and practices surrounding it have shifted alongside marriage. Building Relationships: Online Dating and the New Logics of Internet Culture uses an apparatus approach to media analysis to examine logics of compatibility, online dating site procedures, and user narratives of popular matchmaking sites. Shepherd's investigation serves as a case study to help understand the larger relationship between contemporary identity and what she calls matching technologies, as well as the complex of big data, computational processing, and the cultural assumptions that power today’s most popular web applications.