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IDEA No 78

ONLINE DATING

Whether for friendship, marriage or sex, we are programmed to look for love. Before online dating, it used to be a romantic affair. Now it is an algorithm.

Eighty-one-year-old professor Wu Jieqin and his 58-year-old bride Jiang Xiaohui met online. ‘The internet does not belong to the young alone’, Wu Jieqin told a local newspaper.

Except this is not strictly true. There have always been matchmakers. There have always been blind dates. There have always been arranged marriages. Since the invention of the newspaper in the 1700s, we have had the lonely-hearts column. The Web took this to the ...

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