Abstract
Abstact: Online personals, also known as internet dating sites, are a fast growing phenomena on the web. This article focuses on one Australian site, RSVP, and seeks to understand the modes of subjectivity that are engendered by the practices and discourses of this cultural form. Central to this discussion are the construction of personal profiles, the processes of contacting other users online and in real space, and the way users of the site negotiate the codes and systems that govern RSVP. The ways in which the self is narrated through the use of online personals is structured both by the spatiality and the ordering of everyday life and the increasing intimacy of the computer/user relationship. It is also fundamentally bound up with the ideologies of consumer culture and the interpellation of the self-actualising, or enterprising, individual. This analysis works to locate the self of online personals within the current phase of modernity and its articulation in cultural theory.
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