Technologies of Matching: Romantic Matchmaking, Power, and Algorithmic Culture

This dissertation serves to enhance our understanding of a number issues related to rhetorical studies and cultural studies of digital media while offering a model for how we might take a more holistic approach to such analyses. Using an organizational structure informed by Alexander Galloway's Protocol, this project critiques the billion-dollar online dating industry by analyzing romantic matchmaking on three levels: historical, procedural, and cultural. The introductory chapter elucidates our understanding of the recursive processes of matching and categorization and identifies their mislabeling (as searching, collaborating, and recommending) in discourse surrounding website capacities in order to examine internet romantic matchmaking (i.e., online dating) as a matching technology---a set of technical capabilities, human practices, and cultural conditions that is unique to the contemporary moment and operates within logics of Foucauldian biopower and Deleuzean control. The second chapter weaves together investigations of marriage, family, and romantic matchmaking into a meshwork of relations that provides a more nuanced view of those affiliations as a marriage assemblage. It relies on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's assemblage theory, as well as Manuel DeLanda's explication of assemblage theory for social formations, and Foucauldian-Deleuzean understanding of power and control. Using that framework, Chapter Two examines the contingent social, cultural, familial, economic, and technological relationships that make up the marriage assemblage. In particular, this analysis focuses on the practice of romantic matchmaking as part of that assemblage and a) defines it in terms of three conditions---intermediation, mediation, and automation---and b) positions it in relation to regimes of power. In the third chapter, this project shifts focus to procedurality, primarily rooted in Ian Bogost's work on procedural rhetoric, and operationalizes that framework for digital technologies other than videogames, such as mass-customized web applications. Chapter Three is an analysis of internet romantic matchmaking (IRM) as a formal apparatus, examining the complex of computational processes, logics, and cultural assumptions that enable the functionality of three online dating sites---eHarmony.com, Match.com, and OKCupid.com---and their relationship to the construction of subjects. In the fourth chapter, this investigation of subjectivity and IRM moves from descriptive analysis of processes to the study of knowledge production. Using Michel Foucault's discussion of the historical development of sexuality and its relationship to biopower, especially through the act of confession, Chapter Four scrutinizes the role that a new discursive formation, the IRM success story, as a biopolitical technique for converting risky single subjects into the stabilized married couple. The fifth chapter locates IRM and matching technologies within societies of control. Chapter Five situates marriage and family as two challenging institutions for this transition into control societies and problematizes the synchronic logics of control and IRM with the diachronic logics that enable persistent marriage and familial formations, offering one potential new technique for marriage and family---the renewable marriage contract.