![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
All's Fair in Love and Warcraft?
Feb. 14th, 2025 02:38 pmSince today is Valentine's Day, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at 60 years of computer-aided dating and mating and matching and possibly dispatching.
Sixty years ago, computer dating was a cool new idea. If you wanted to meet someone and there weren't enough in-person opportunities, you'd probably look in the Personals ads of your local newspaper. OK, I'm showing my cultural bias here, because I know there are still vast areas of the world where arranged marriages are the norm, and where go-betweens may or may not give due consideration to interpersonal choices and preferences and overall compatibility. But I digress.
On the BBC site, I found an interesting article about a couple of early computer people-matching programs:
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250206-the-rocky-1960s-origins-of-online-dating?at_campaign_type=owned&at_medium=emails&at_objective=awareness&at_ptr_type=email&at_ptr_name=salesforce&at_campaign=essentiallist&at_email_send_date=20250214&at_send_id=4287976&at_link_title=https%3a%2f%2fwww.bbc.com%2fculture%2farticle%2f20250206-the-rocky-1960s-origins-of-online-dating&at_bbc_team=crm
The TACT (Technical Automated Compatibility Testing) program involved asking the participants a number of decidedly tactless questions that in many cases were irrelevant in pinpointing the criteria they considered essential or desirable!
Are things any better now? Certainly a lot of people are meeting online these days. I suspect it's technically possible to match up compatible people with a greater degree of precision, assuming they're open and honest about who they are and what their expectations and motives are. Here's another BBC article which discusses a more modern scenario:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7zxgxdggjo
I've never used any dating apps myself so all this is pure speculation on my part. Anyway, I think the risks nowadays are much higher, or at least much greater precautions and technosavvitude are called for!
Back then, if you consistently got dud-matches, you'd probably just stop using the service and maybe fight to get your money back. Privacy and confidentiality were easier to preserve in those days but the online environment has brought things to a whole new level of scariness.
I met my long-time partner back in the 1970s. It wasn't via computer, although computers did play a role. We were both employed keypunching information into those 80-column computer cards that were used in a mainframe environment.
Sixty years ago, computer dating was a cool new idea. If you wanted to meet someone and there weren't enough in-person opportunities, you'd probably look in the Personals ads of your local newspaper. OK, I'm showing my cultural bias here, because I know there are still vast areas of the world where arranged marriages are the norm, and where go-betweens may or may not give due consideration to interpersonal choices and preferences and overall compatibility. But I digress.
On the BBC site, I found an interesting article about a couple of early computer people-matching programs:
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250206-the-rocky-1960s-origins-of-online-dating?at_campaign_type=owned&at_medium=emails&at_objective=awareness&at_ptr_type=email&at_ptr_name=salesforce&at_campaign=essentiallist&at_email_send_date=20250214&at_send_id=4287976&at_link_title=https%3a%2f%2fwww.bbc.com%2fculture%2farticle%2f20250206-the-rocky-1960s-origins-of-online-dating&at_bbc_team=crm
The TACT (Technical Automated Compatibility Testing) program involved asking the participants a number of decidedly tactless questions that in many cases were irrelevant in pinpointing the criteria they considered essential or desirable!
Are things any better now? Certainly a lot of people are meeting online these days. I suspect it's technically possible to match up compatible people with a greater degree of precision, assuming they're open and honest about who they are and what their expectations and motives are. Here's another BBC article which discusses a more modern scenario:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg7zxgxdggjo
I've never used any dating apps myself so all this is pure speculation on my part. Anyway, I think the risks nowadays are much higher, or at least much greater precautions and technosavvitude are called for!
Back then, if you consistently got dud-matches, you'd probably just stop using the service and maybe fight to get your money back. Privacy and confidentiality were easier to preserve in those days but the online environment has brought things to a whole new level of scariness.
I met my long-time partner back in the 1970s. It wasn't via computer, although computers did play a role. We were both employed keypunching information into those 80-column computer cards that were used in a mainframe environment.
