ABSTRACT
New and different media change society. Marshall McLuhan said of television, “The medium is the message” in that media impose an inherent structure which is itself a form of message apart from the inner message, which is what we normally think of as the message, that the medium transmits (McLuhan 1964). The same view can be taken of dating using digital media. The digital medium is an extension of our communication faculties. The Internet and its digital helpers such as photo editors, animated graphics and sound, have made a new dating venue offering new opportunities and restrictions. The Internet has fostered dating for several diverse groups including heterosexuals, homosexuals and those seeking recreational sex. We will examine these three dating moieties and the characteristics of Internet dating that are common to all Internet daters and how the digital age has affected them. There is an important discovery, the global insignificance of income and education, which
condenses a great deal of the statistics about Internet dating. Jessica Sautter (Sautter et al. 2006, 2010) examined attitudes towards Internet dating among single American Internet users and found that, apart from being single, simply being on the Internet frequently for whatever reason was the common characteristic of Internet daters. While being on the Internet regularly was controlled primarily by socioeconomic factors affecting Internet access and digital literacy, these same socioeconomic factors had no effect on the choice of whether or not to engage in Internet dating. In her study, Internet users tended to be younger, richer, more educated, not disabled, live in a suburb or city and more likely to be white. Sautter thus identified a “digital divide” separating Internet users from non-users but found all singles on the digital side of the divide equally likely candidates for online dating. A Dutch study (Valkenburg and Peter 2007) found no effect of income and a slight negative effect of increased education on the likelihood of one being an Internet dater. However, the Dutch study recruited its sample using the Internet, thus bypassing any digital divide.
