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"What dates like these remind me of is job interviews. Everything is riding on your initial appearance.... Everything in capitalist society, including people and nature, are seen from the point of view of their exchange value." Weigel's observations reminded of Eva Illouz's *Cold Intimacies: The Makings of Emotion Capitalism;* in particular, where she says that the entire dynamic of online dating is completely reversed from previous forms of Romantic interaction: "If attraction usually precedes knowledge of another person, here knowledge precedes attraction ... [P]eople are apprehended first as a set of attributes and only then ... do they apprehend the bodily presence of another". The idea here being that online dating is a sort of marketplace of commodified personalities (profiles), which are nothing more than readily computable, idealized representations of the self that happen to be measurable, machine-readable aggregates of discrete attributes and variables (the profile structures themselves configured and predetermined by the dating service). If alienation is the loss of the bond to reality, as Marx suggests, then the superstructural manifestation of the online dating world is a pretty compelling example. *Cold Intimacies *comes highly recommended, by the way. FWIW Craig Butosi, MA, MLIS, BMus Hons. Website: craigbutosi.ca Library: library.craigbutosi.ca _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
