White Collar Intimacy

Abstract

An advertisement beckons in a London Underground carriage on the Piccadilly Line coming in from Heathrow Airport. Lovestruck.com, ‘where busy people click’, is a dating site that ‘lets you meet single professionals working nearby’, whether you are at home, in the office or ‘on-the-go’. ‘No matter where you work in London’ the website reads — ‘Soho, Chelsea, The West End, Notting Hill, Canary Wharf or The City’ — this online community ‘lets you walk into a bar or venue and see which fellow Lovestruckers are out and about’. While its ‘high-calibre’ membership is developing in various locations across the English-speaking world, the service is ‘strictly for city singles’. At first glance, Lovestruck is just one of a range of platforms premised on the convenience enabled by geo-mapping technology. The advantage of such applications — from Grindr to Foursquare and lately Facebook’s Places — is more than just the pleasure of discovering attractive company. Each in their own way makes city space legible, familiar, inhabitable. The taste logic of profile pages establishes the terms of encounter in advance, making the anonymity of the city safe to navigate. With the utmost discretion, social networking sites and their geomapping counterparts domesticate life’s unruly potential, online and off.