Internet Matching Services
After breaking up with Russell at the end of Season 1 and losing her job at the very beginning of Season 2, Jess is not in the best place. While sitting at the bar where Nick works in Season 2 Episode 2 (“Katie”), Jess is approached by a handsome man named Sam who asks her if she’s Katie from CupidMatch.com. Caught up in the moment, Jess says that she is in fact Katie and just goes along with it. As they begin to talk, Sam expresses how excited he is to finally meet her after exchanging so many emails and learning about things like her puppy and music interests. The couple eventually ends up back at Jess’s apartment and Sam stays the night. The next day, Jess feels invigorated by getting to be fun and exciting Katie rather than her dorky, adorable self (cue pictures below).
This chance encounter is a very good example of the deception that can be associated with Internet matching websites. Today, there are many different types of Internet matching services that rely on specific forms of match making such as random matching, self-matching and scientific matching (Sprecher, 2011). Based on the initial conversation that Sam and Jess have in which Sam goes back over the things he remembered they (well, he and Katie) had in common, it seems as though CupidMatch.com is very similar to Match.com in that it allows users to create profiles and then select their matches based on the information presented in their profiles (Sprecher, 2011). The episode did not go into more detail as to how CupidMatch worked and what exactly was displayed on the profiles, but it’s clear from the initial interaction between Sam and Jess that Sam didn’t actually know what Katie looked like or he simply mistook Jess as Katie because they looked similar. Nevertheless, the mediated nature of Sam and Katie’s emails meant that some degree of visual anonymity was clearly involved, as is common with computer-mediated-communication (CMC) (Ellison, Heino, & Gibbs, 2006). While the empirical literature has tended to focus on the deception that can occur in online interactions via dating sites, this scene in which Jess meets Sam demonstrates that deception can also occur face-to-face. Research has shown that the asynchronous nature and visual anonymity of dating sites and CMC can allow the participants to express themselves with less inhibitions, assuming that they will eventually meet in person (Ellison, Heino, & Gibbs, 2006). Jess’s interaction with Sam shows that those seemingly positive elements of Internet matching services can indeed be part of the dark side because people like Jess can easily take advantage of the visual anonymity and uncertainty of CMC and essentially steal someone’s date when the relationships shifts to face-to-face interaction.
At the end of the episode, after Sam finds out that Jess isn’t really Katie, he goes back to her apartment to tell her that he doesn’t care that she lied to him because he lied about a lot of the information in his profile. This exemplifies one of the major dark sides of Internet dating sites: socially acceptable lies (Ellison, Heino, & Gibbs, 2006). In a study conducted by Ellison, Heino, and Gibbs (2006), it was found that people often misrepresented themselves in their profiles because they were using information they felt would help them get a good match and not fall prey to the website’s filtering system. Much like the participants in this study, Sam altered his profile so possible partners wouldn’t reject him. After telling Jess that he also lied, Sam says that he doesn’t care to learn anything about Jess; all he wants is a purely sexual relationship. Jess goes along with it because she enjoyed being fun and spontaneous but this also illustrates how online dating can lead to shallow instead of meaningful relationships (Sprecher, 2011). Luckily for Jess and Sam, the elements of the dark side of online dating seemed to help them rather than hurt them.