Every new way of being introduced has attracted the same claim

The argument

The second argument for this position is about the claim itself rather than about the technology. Proponents point out that every new channel of introduction has been said to be transforming relationships: the intermediary who paired strangers, the newspaper column in which people advertised for a spouse, the dance hall that put young people together without supervision, the workplace that mixed them outside their own neighbourhoods, the telephone that let them talk unobserved. In each case the complaint and the enthusiasm had the structure the current ones have, namely that a new means of meeting would alter what it meant to be a couple. Proponents argue that the record of those predictions is poor. What followed each change was a period of unfamiliarity, some new etiquette, and then the same institution operating through a new channel. People married, stayed, strayed and parted for reasons that look much as they always did, and the novelty was absorbed rather than transformative. The position draws a methodological point from this. Because a new channel is visible and the continuities are not, observers reliably overestimate the change: the mechanics of meeting are easy to describe and easy to compare with how things were done before, while the slow and private business of two people making a life together is neither. Proponents argue that the reasonable expectation, on the record of every previous channel, is that online dating has given people a new way to meet and has left the relationships that result recognisably what they were.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics answer that an argument from past false alarms cannot establish that this change is another one. That some predicted transformations failed to arrive says nothing about whether this one has, and the same reasoning would have dismissed changes that did occur, such as the effect of reliable contraception or of women's entry into paid work on what marriage is taken to be for. They add that differences of scale matter, since a channel supplying thousands of candidates, continuous availability and selection by stated attributes is not obviously the same kind of thing as a dance hall. On that view the argument counsels caution and then substitutes caution for an answer.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That earlier channels attracted the same claim says nothing about whether the claim is true this time, and some predicted transformations of relationships did in fact occur. [Rejecting P2] Absorption of a novelty is compatible with substantial change, since the institution that persists may be persisting on altered terms. [Rejecting P3] The asymmetry of visibility cuts both ways, since continuities are also easy to assert and hard to check, so it does not favour the conclusion. [Rejecting C] At most it follows that claims of transformation deserve scepticism, not that online dating has changed nothing.