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Technologies are meant to enable us to contact more people, more often, and in this way ''network'' with others. Applied to dating, this would appear to be a good thing, as people would thereby benefit from having additional choice. However, the flip side of the coin is that because of the increased choice we get a case of too much information, too many choices, too many potential (and potentially unsatisfying) mates. We find in a qualitative study of online daters that filtering through the many options, partners and choices offered by online dating sites is a prime concern in online dating. Our aim in this paper is to characterize these filtering techniques, and also to discuss their potential social impact. We find that filtering begins at the initial screening process as daters try to ''catch out'' incongruous behaviour before investing too much energy in someone unsuitable. Participants quickly become increasingly technologically literate of the code-based features of the site in their quest for greater filtering efficiency. They also come to rely on the cultivation of their own filtering ''instinct''. In the end, however, the prevalence and ongoing practice of filtering creates what can only be termed a shopping culture of dating, which often serves to sap the dating energies of participants.

A B S T R A C T G Despite growing political and academic interest in increasesin surveillance brought about by digital technology, users of these technologies themselves appear to remain relatively unconcerned with surveillance, accepting the trade-off of greater usability for decreased control. This article interrogates the contradiction between people's professed opinions and their actual behaviours, and the contradiction between public and academic discourse and people's everyday disregard. It does so by comparing a theoretical model currently in common use for analysing surveillance, focused around a Deleuzian conception of 'control society', with users' own perceptions about the relative harm of surveillance, using data drawn from a qualitative study. In this enterprise, the study seeks to advance David Lyon's call to understand whether and how users actually consent to surveillance in their everyday lives. The study finds two main points of difference and one point of commonality between control society analyses of surveillance and users' own perceptions and experiences of being surveilled. Whereas a control society analysis points to the increasingly simulated quality of much of the data being generated about 'dividuals', users themselves hold onto notions about the truth and reliability of that information. Whereas a control society analysis conceptualizes surveillance in terms of postmodern forms of control which are dispersed, slippery and leak into everyday practice, users profess an ability to target surveillance attempts within specific spaces and attached to particular information domains. Control society analyses and user experiences of surveillance do converge, however, around the third tenet emerging from this scholarship: the notion of participatory surveillance, and how consent is currently operationalized. G

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