Prosumer of Emotions. Love and Emotional Labor on Online Dating Platforms

• In Event: 167 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Paper Session. Love's Labors Lost? Emotion Work in Hard Times

Abstract

The modern ideal of love establishes a clear distinction between the private sphere of intimate relationships and the public sphere of the market economy. In practice, this distinction has often been contested and the boundaries are not always clear. But the feeling rules of our society still suggest that love – and especially falling in love – should feel different than being engaged in an economic relationship.
The paper analyzes this differentiation in a specific setting that has become increasingly important for today’s couple formation: the internet. We rely on own empirical work about online dating. This case is especially interesting because it shows how the emotional activity in the realm of love can become a direct source of economic value creation: In order to sell paid memberships, a platform has to promise exiting emotional experiences and relationships to their new customers. In practice however, these experiences are not produced by the company but by the actual users, depending on the emotional quality and intensity of their interactions. Regarded this way, their emotional activity turns into a form of “emotional labor” that produces an economic surplus value for the platform. The users become “prosumers of emotion” – producers and consumers at the same time.
The paper analyzes the way in which dating platforms try to stimulate emotions and to transform them into productive emotional labor. But it will also look at how the users deal with this situation and how they try to protect their emotions against this process of commodification.

Authors

• Kai Droege, Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt, and hslu, Lucerne

• Olivier Voirol, University of Lausanne