Online Dating – A Unified and Unifying Symbolic Good Market

Abstract

This last chapter will combine the lines of argumentation and provide a conclusive sociological understanding of the phenomenon ‘online dating’. Applying a Bourdieusian notion of ‘structure’, we will argue that the social distances between agents of different social classes, otherwise maintained by social, geographic, and institutional segregation in a largely direct way, are consolidated in digital partner markets in a particularly immediate way. In the ‘hyper-focus’ online dating, users – socially classified before even entering the market – classify themselves, their symbolic goods and their potential partners in the course of their practices and interactions. It is under the conditions of numeric abundance of potential partners from all social classes where the scarcity and hierarchy of symbolic goods already operative in the offline world come to light and can unfold their full force. A dating platform is a partner market with a unique efficacy, as it allows symbolic capital to operate very efficiently in its function of converting the users’ capital endowments. In the aggregate, users thereby create a particularly structured market, which reinforces the relations of societal domination also effective outside of the online dating market. In contrast to reductionist theories of individual choice, that conceive of the market’s structure as condition and outcome of individual preferences only, the Bourdieusian conceptualization helps us to understand the role of relational structuring practices. Given the fact that habitus is operative even in the supposedly structure-free sphere of online dating, this work makes a case for a sociological approach that remains sensitive to the aggregated effects of reproduction strategies in a realm closest to the idea of freedom of action.