Online Dating Advice: Exactly What To Say In A First Message « OkTrends
From is a brilliant analysis of word usage in first messages on OKCupid, and whether that sender got a response.
At the risk of making everyone think I am insane: this is the coolest link I have ever posted.
Dear everyone who doesn’t understand what I went to college for: THIS IS PRECISELY IT. This is what my bullshit made up minor-that-was-almost-a-major-but-I-wimped-out “Language Media and Expressive Culture” is all about. I am so excited this exists it’s retarded. OKcupid fulfills my greatest dreams, ever, with all these charts and graphs of message trending, word occurance…. I’m seriously freaking out. No, seriously. Charts and graphs and analyses of socioinguistic performativity in the environment in which people are most concerned about self-presentation (that is, a highly controlled profile which one has, presumably, created to get laid and/or fall in love?!?!! How we use language to present ourselves when looking for a potential “mate” in a structured, quantifiable new-media social environment?! Language and power and geography and gender and sex and the social/digital environment and every possible social variable ever??!?! OH GOD.
The chart above is interesting — albeit presented as goofy “dating advice” from statistics (could we get any goonier?) — because it’s about something close to my heart — linguistic quantification/hedging and its relation to gender (something which gets nauseatingly provincial unbelievably fast.) While constantly debatable (and context is a huge determining factor for outcomes of these studies) and very little can every be extrapolated or generalized from this, it’s usually observed that women hedge or quantify more often (be that conditioning, performativity, WHATEVER)… so women (who are looking for a mate) respond better to men who are “less alpha” or “less patriarchal” when approaching a mate (as theoretically indicated by the inclusion of a hedge) — is this conscious or subconscious? What if we throw the bullshit gender comparisons out the window and just look at it through the frame of politeness and engagement? But then I want this chart lined up against non-heterosexual interactions though, and female-to-male….
Also interesting (and downright amusing) are some of their maps/graphs of survey question answers per state (with a sample size waay larger than any Gallup poll) as well as more charts about stuff like message length and conversations, etc.
