Jessica Pidoux is a Doctoral Assistant. She is currently doing her PhD in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) and has been granted by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Her research focuses on the online dating phenomena. She studies the algorithmic quantification practices, which are central to the platforms functioning and as the primary factor in meeting somebody online. Anchored in a pragmatic approach, and using computational methods, she is specifically intent on studying the visible features emerging on the Graphical User Interfaces as “signals of attention” (Boullier, 2014), which provide communication between developers and users. She hypothesizes that the matching mechanism is a permanent form of apprenticeship for both algorithmic systems and humans involved. It is based on signals that will never be fully understood by either one actor or another because this learning model is dynamic, in continuous iteration, and based on a divergence of perspectives that could, at some point but not necessarily, converge. The principal goals of her future research are to conduct a cross-study platform by identifying the nature of the features available on dating websites and mobile apps. In this, she will be able to understand the platforms “conceptual model“ (Norman, 1988) and to reconstitute users strategies when “making sense“ (Cicourel, 1974) from the features they use in online dating interactions.
