The Ethics of Matching: Mobile and web-based dating and hook up platforms

In this chapter, we argued that DHAs have the potential to be a socially and morally disruptive technology which is already and may continue to change the way people treat each other in the context of dating and hooking up, understand themselves in these contexts, and understand the practices in which they are engaging. The chapter does not commit to a broad assessment of DHAs as a whole. Instead, we highlighted several features of the technology that encourage certain uses, behaviors, and attitudes and brought out some of their moral dimensions, using mediation theory, affordances, and soft and hard impacts. Finally, we introduced design for values methodologies, especially VSD. The aim of introducing this methodology is to suggest that, if we have convinced the reader that DHAs can have significant moral impacts, then we may want to intentionally design them with the values that we explicitly endorse. Users and designers alike must dispel the myth that DHAs are merely a new way of communicating for lust and love that is value neutral. Only once we are all aware of the scripts, we are following can we question whether or not they reflect our values, goals, and conceptions of the good life in this context.