Online Dating Case Study

1.1 Background of study

The reason that I am interested in studying online dating is that I wanted to understand how people perceive ideas of finding love in the online world. After searching for love, two strangers can fall in love with each other. To me, love is a very mysterious thing and anyone can fall into it at any time. When I was studying in primary school, I heard many rumours from my female and male friends that they liked each other. Anyhow, many of them were just puppy love where it ended after finishing school. Soon on later, I studied in secondary girl school, where rumours existed in a different way. I heard my friends knew new guys in online using social networking sites such as Facebook, Friendster which were started to

In 1995, World Wide Web has created before the availability of online dating (Thottam, 2016). After that, email is accessible to the users in year 1998, followed by arise of dating websites in 2000 and the enhancement of video dating in 2003. In 2004, social networking sites such as Facebook are developed. In 2007, smart phones were introduced to the mass markets and its mobile dating apps are getting popular with the ability to track location in 2012. Besides that, sexual orientation of homosexuality is promoted in online dating since 2009. Dating through the Internet is getting more acceptable in the eyes of the public and until today, different kind of websites is invented according to different types of interests such as sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity. For instance, Plenty of Fish, OkCupid, Match.com and Tinder are among the few popular dating websites (Masculine Profiles, 2014). Bulletin boards, newsgroups, web, magazines are promoting this service until it is now a new platform for people to meet with each other. Based on Kennedy (2010), Internet provides dating users a unique experience as it includes audio, images and databases of personal background; besides, provides users the preference in location and enhancement in communication. The dating pool is infinite and unlimited whereby users can talk about anything, with anyone at anywhere (Kennedy,

Scammers will tend to create false profiles with fake information and photos. After knowing them, scammers especially from foreign countries will find chances to cheat users’ money with the excuse of helping to resolve money problems in some medical or travel emergency. In a research done by Telenor group, 400 users aged from 18 to 65 were surveyed in four countries, which are Malaysia, Thailand, India and Singapore (New Straits Time Online, 2016). There is one out of five Malaysians have fallen for online dating scams (The Star Online, 2016). Scammers will tend to create a fake profile on online dating site to elicit money. Besides that, online dating scam was appeared to be among the top methods of scamming in these Asia countries, which accounting for 14% of the survey results (White, 2016). In addition, not only scammers will cheat for the purpose of money, online daters will also deceive others for romantic love by presenting their idealized manner (Finkel et al., 2006). Due to the accessibility of online dating, anyone can use the forum to represent whoever they want to be (Westminster, 2016). For instance, they will lie on their socioeconomic status, age, hobbies, interests or physical appearance (Koester, 2016). Apart from that, with the endless options provided in online dating, some people are not motivated to put their efforts, time and commitment in just one