! ABSTRACT SHEPHERD, DAWN RENEE. Technologies of Matching: Romantic Matchmaking, Power, and Algorithmic Culture. (Under the direction of Drs. Carolyn R. Miller and Jeremy Packer.) This dissertation serves to enhance our understanding of a number issues related to rhetorical studies and cultural studies of digital media while offering a model for how we might take a more holistic approach to such analyses. Using an organizational structure informed by Alexander Galloway's Protocol, this project critiques the billion-dollar online dating industry by analyzing romantic matchmaking on three levels: historical, procedural, and cultural. The introductory chapter elucidates our understanding of the recursive processes of matching and categorization and identifies their mislabeling (as searching, collaborating, and recommending) in discourse surrounding website capacities in order to examine internet romantic matchmaking (i.e., online dating) as a matching technology—a set of technical capabilities, human practices, and cultural conditions that is unique to the contemporary moment and operates within logics of Foucauldian biopower and Deleuzean control. The second chapter weaves together investigations of marriage, family, and romantic matchmaking into a meshwork of relations that provides a more nuanced view of those affiliations as a marriage assemblage. It relies on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's assemblage theory, as well as Manuel DeLanda's explication of assemblage theory for social formations, and Foucauldian-Deleuzean understanding of power and control. Using that framework, Chapter Two examines the contingent social, cultural, familial, economic, and technological relationships that make up the marriage assemblage. In particular, this analysis focuses on the practice of romantic matchmaking as part of that assemblage and a) defines it in terms of three conditions—intermediation, mediation, and automation—and b) positions it ! in relation to regimes of power. In the third chapter, this project shifts focus to procedurality, primarily rooted in Ian Bogost's work on procedural rhetoric, and operationalizes that framework for digital technologies other than videogames, such as mass-customized web applications. Chapter Three is an analysis of internet romantic matchmaking (IRM) as a formal apparatus, examining the complex of computational processes, logics, and cultural assumptions that enable the functionality of three online dating sites—eHarmony.com, Match.com, and OKCupid.com—and their relationship to the construction of subjects. In the fourth chapter, this investigation of subjectivity and IRM moves from descriptive analysis of processes to the study of knowledge production. Using Michel Foucault's discussion of the historical development of sexuality and its relationship to biopower, especially through the act of confession, Chapter Four scrutinizes the role that a new discursive formation, the IRM success story, as a biopolitical technique for converting risky single subjects into the stabilized married couple. The fifth chapter locates IRM and matching technologies within societies of control. Chapter Five situates marriage and family as two challenging institutions for this transition into control societies and problematizes the synchronic logics of control and IRM with the diachronic logics that enable persistent marriage and familial formations, offering one potential new technique for marriage and family—the renewable marriage contract. ! © Copyright 2012 by Dawn Renee Shepherd All Rights Reserved Technologies of Matching: Romantic Matchmaking, Power, and Algorithmic Culture by Dawn Renee Shepherd A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media Raleigh, North Carolina 2012 APPROVED BY: _______________________________ ______________________________ Susan Miller-Cochran Stephen B. Crofts Wiley ________________________________ ________________________________ Carolyn R. Miller Jeremy Packer Chair of Advisory Committee Co-Chair of Advisory Committee ! ii ! ! ! DEDICATION For Bright and Hattie, John and Beryl, Donny and Amey ! iii ! ! ! BIOGRAPHY Dawn Shepherd is a rhetoric scholar with interests in digital media and cultural critique. She grew up in Gibsonville, North Carolina and received a B.A. in English education with a minor in Dramatic Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before earning her Master of Arts in English with a concentration in rhetoric and composition from North Carolina State University, she spent ten years working in the private sector, with five years' experience in the technology industry. Dawn began her doctoral education in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program at North Carolina State University in 2007. Her primary research brings together the fields of rhetorical studies and cultural studies, and she has a secondary interest in writing program administration. Her work with Carolyn R. Miller on genre studies and weblogs has been reprinted in the Norton Book of Composition Studies, and she has presented work at the National Communication Association Conference, the College Conference on College Composition and Communication, the Biennial Conference of the Rhetoric Society of America, the Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition as well as local and regional conferences and symposia. ! iv ! ! ! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee—Carolyn Miller, Susan Miller-Cochran, Jeremy Packer, and Steve Wiley—for their patience, guidance, and support through this process. As co-directors of this project, Carolyn Miller and Jeremy Packer helped me to formulate and articulate my ideas along the way, and I am especially appreciative of the time they have taken to help me reconcile my disparate ideas and interests into this project. Through their careful reading and thoughtful commenting, Susan Miller- Cochran and Steve Wiley helped me to reach a more new nuanced approach to this project and to complicate my understanding of significant cultural institutions. I have been fortunate to have a variety of kinds of support while working on this project. The faculty and students in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program at North Carolina State University have supported my work and challenged my thinking, and the faculty, staff, and students in the Departments of English and Communication have fostered a productive and safe environment for working, learning, and growing. I am especially thankful for the opportunity to work through my ideas—and the feedback I received—during my courses led by Mike Carter, Victoria Gallagher, Melissa Johnson, Chris Lundberg, Carolyn Miller, Susan Miller-Cochran, Jeremy Packer, and Steve Wiley. Much of the groundwork for this project was established during (and at Porter's Tavern and the Players' Retreat after) Jeremy Packer's Foucault seminar and Steve Wiley's social space seminar. In addition to Jeremy and Steve, I would like to thank my classmates for their help as well, especially Christian Casper, Kevin Flanagan, Jordan Frith, Dan Kim, ! v ! ! ! Kathy Oswald, Shayne Pepper, Adam Rottinghaus, Dan Sutko, and Anna Turnage. My new friends and colleagues in the Department of English at Boise State University have also provided me with support as I finished this project. I sometimes marvel at how lucky I have been to be surrounded by such wonderful human beings and such excellent role models for how to teach, research, and serve. I thank my family and friends for their love and support. My parents, Donny and Amey Shepherd, are the two best people I have ever known, and I am grateful to the them— and all of the Beals, Greesons, Shepherds, and Silers who supported me on this journey that has taken me so far away from home. I also thank Kathy Oswald and Shayne Pepper who have become so important to me over the past few years. I have found lifelong friends in them, and the time spent playing and laughing with them and Kati Fargo Ahern, Kevin Brock, Jordan Laster, Nancy McVittie, Adam Rottinghaus, and Dan Sutko made this whole process a lot more fun. Finally, thank you to James Burka for being amazing and for keeping me alive. ! vi ! ! ! TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................................ vii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................. 1 TECHNOLOGIES OF MATCHING ........................................................................................................... 8 THE CASE FOR ROMANTIC MATCHMAKING ..................................................................................... 14 CONTEMPORARY SCHOLARSHIP ON COMPUTATIONAL PROCESSES ................................................. 22 PROTOCOL ........................................................................................................................................ 32 CHAPTER TWO: ROMANTIC MATCHMAKING AND THE MARRIAGE ASSEMBLAGE45 ASSEMBLAGE THEORY ..................................................................................................................... 47 ROMANTIC MATCHMAKING: INTERMEDIATION, MEDIATION, AND AUTOMATION ......................... 54 Intermediation .............................................................................................................................