Greetings lovely email friends, hope you’re okay. With pine-needles still scattered across pavements and supermarket shelves bulging with Easter eggs and mosquito repellent, it’s a wonder we are even able to maintain any sense of seasonality. Fortunately there’s a few overpriced cards, overpackaged chocolates and high-carbon cut flowers to remind us it’s mid-February. 💘
Big dating: The digital era has allowed dating to industrialise. As of six month ago, around 40% of straight couples in the US first met online. That’s doubled in a decade. Aside from Amazon Dating, it has prompted the formation of conglomerate Match Group, Inc., owner of some of the biggest brands in online dating, including match.com, OkCupid, PlentyOfFish and Tinder.
One might assume dating wouldn’t make a sustainable business: once customers find what they seek, they cancel their account. Yet last year Tinder earned $1.2 billion in revenue from its over five million paying subscribers, with many more using its free tier.
The act of swiping has become emblematic of this era’s high-speed, high-volume approach to profile-rating. Yet this binary maxim of user interface carries prejudices, but stranger still is the behavioural changes it has provoked, like vindictive users forcing bans upon women who reject them. And while Tinder has a reputation for casual hook-ups (not that there’s anything wrong with that), the profiles of 18 to 24-year-olds were 66% more likely than the generation above to feature issues like climate change, gun control or social justice.
Our screens are weaving themselves indelibly into how we date, but many apps routinely share preferences and location information with marketers. While 52% of 18 to 24-year-olds say video games have a positive influence on their relationships, there’s also a crop of apps designed to help heal broken hearts. 💔
😷 ‘It’s a Moral Imperative:’ Archivists Made a Directory of 5,000 Coronavirus Studies to Bypass Paywalls: the organisers see their project as a resource for scientists and non-scientists alike to study the virus unhindered by paywalls.
📉 Visualising the 700-Year Decline of Interest Rates: exploring why rates are approaching zero, posing a big and long-term challenge for monetary policy.
👟 Nike Introduces The Sustainably Designed Space Hippie: if The Wombles were let loose in the Nike factory overnight they might have come up with this sneaker, which is made up of recycled materials and leftover yarn. I like them.
📊 Irrational Pricing: An Example of Behavioural Economics: a really good dig into how pricing works. We’re irrational creatures, so the way we value items in an economic transaction is often quite irrational too.
📻 Growing up with Radiohead: Pete Paphides considers what the band’s longevity means for both its fans and members, how with each release the band’s sound embraced the unknown just as we do with life.
🌳 Have humans evolved beyond nature – and do we even need it? Ooh big chunky question, this. Such is the extent of humans’ dominion on Earth, can we still consider ourselves to be part of nature?
🤫 Can privacy be big business? A wave of startups thinks so: privacy-focused technology companies are offering a variety of services, from personal data scrubbing to business-focused software meant to help companies comply with the law.
Date against the machine: When affair site Ashley Madison was hacked, the release of its users’ details led to resignations, divorces and suicides. It also transpired the site routinely used bots to strike up conversations with its predominantly male customers, which made the whole thing feel fraudulent.
But had Ashley Madison been open about it, they’d maybe hit upon something more compelling than the site’s original proposition, since it may be possible to fall for a robot. In the AI era, maybe the humans would prefer an artificial companion.
More recently, a new dating technology has emerged, based on DNA compatibility. But compatibility is poorly understood and DNA is complex. So the whole thing smacks of, at best, a discriminatory disaster waiting to happen, and at worst, eugenics. 💉
Finally: Many emoji have come to have meanings more nuanced than was intended by their creators. Sometimes it’s euphemism, in other cases it’s because slightly different emoji designs between platforms are interpreted differently. But there’s also instances where the symbol has different cultural interpretations around the world. Classic case in point: the many meanings of the pinched fingers emoji. 🤔