Commercializing desire for platform economics: digital romance in China’s platformization age

ABSTRACT

This study joins the recently emerging scholarly initiatives, seeking to bridge ideas on platform studies and digital dating studies. This study examined China’s leading matchmaking and dating platform, Century Jiayuan and its users’ digital dating experiences. It specifically examined the ways in which romance and marriage are framed in relations to the deployment of design tactics of platforms, such as programmable architecture building, classifying, ranking, and predicting, to articulate hegemonic discourses about neoliberal desire. The results indicates that the logics of platformization promote the commercialization of desire and the normalization of user ranking via three mutually enhancing mechanisms: platforms as markets, users as customers, and users as sellers. Research limitations are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Commercialization
• desire
• digital dating
• digital platform
• platformization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See details at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkn9PPsREZc, visited on 12 January 2021.

2. For details of the ad, see https://www.bilibili.com/video/av21718046/, visited on 12 January 2021.

3. For details about the operation of Jiayuan’s, see The Secret of the Matchmakers: Undercover Discovery of Jiayuan Century via: https://finance.sina.com.cn/chanjing/gsnews/2021-12-07/doc-ikyamrmy7355383.shtml , visited on 23 April 2022.

4. The majority of our participants expressed dissatisfaction with Jiayuan’s profusion of (at times unwelcome) text messages.

5. For details of the article Ten Standards to Define a Good Wife. Do You Meet These Standards?, and a representative photo of a ‘good wife’, see http://qinggan.jiayuan.com/article_list.php?leibie=simikongjian&jiayuanid=8552, visited on 13 October 2020.

6. For details of the article How to Fill in the Information on Dating Site, see: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/52930678, visited on 13 October 2020.

Additional information

Funding

The paper is supported by the Chinese Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project, titled ”Researching the Communication Model and Effectiveness of Live Streaming E-Commerce in the Context of Rural Revitalization“ (grant number: 22YJC860021).