“You’Ve Got a Match” – Selection Processes in Web-Based Environments

According to Max Weber “any type of order governing social action […] leaves room for a process of selection”. Interaction orders contain a form of social structure in which certain types of behaviour are preferential while other types are neglected. The paper focuses on processes of selection within everyday encounters in web-based environments. It asks how interaction orders can be understood in which someone chooses one person over another online. Therefor different ‘web-based stages’ are analysed and contrasted, i.e. distant carpooling services, social as well as dating applications, and career-oriented social networking sites. The problem to match people can be understood as a problem of relevance: ‘Web-based stages’ institutionalize specific systems of relevance (Alfred Schutz) and thereby 1) determine what characteristics are important within selection processes. 2) They transform individual characteristics into typical social roles and 3) function as specific schemes of interpretation in which individual actors can align their motivational relevance with other persons. The focus of the paper is on the interplay between individual orientation and symbolic/mediatized environments. First, it reconstructs the formal structures and mediatized constructions of different ,web-based stages’ and their different techniques of social management. Second, the different possibilities for individual action within these environments will be analysed. Here the focus is on the possibilities of self-presentation and self-objectification in web-based encounters. While in face-to-face-situations processes of selection often rely on the co-bodily presence of the person choosing and the person getting selected, in web-based encounters persons need to invest a lot of time to give themselves a semiotic and symbolic character. The increase of the meaning of indirectness in modern selection processes will be theorized and the problem of the unequal distribution of knowledge within selection processes discussed.