The chapter about making new media make sense was extremely easy to identify with, as a person growing up in my generation. These anxieties surrounding new media seemed particularly relevant and I immediately thought of the many casual dating apps that are being created. The first of these apps was the very popular Tinder and although it is not as popular as it once was, it is still very prevalent along with other dating apps like Hinge, Happn, Jswipe, Grindr, Hitch, and plenty more. In the generation before us, Match.com, eHarmony, and other dating websites were the new frontiers in this media and were often met by anxiety and hesitation from people participating in them. Now that these sites have been around so long, we have become accustomed to them. Most people know at least one couple that is married or dating and met on one of these websites. The days a similar equivalent for our generation is Tinder. On Tinder, the user attaches a few pictures and a description of themselves. They are then presented with one picture after another of people and their description. These people then make a quick decision whether to say yes or no to the person with the swipe of a finger. If two people both say yes to each other, they are notified and have the ability to start a conversation with one another. One of the major reservations I have about tinder and the reason I didn’t download it was the speed of the decisions. The idea of basing if I want to hook up with or date a person based on a few pictures and words gives me a lot of anxiety. The speed at which things are decided and then the opportunity of conversation based on just that quick decision is so much faster than things would progress in normal life. Although most people that I know using Tinder or that used Tinder, used it just for fun, but some people actually formed real relationships. One of my friends actually dated a man she met on Tinder for over a year. Although it is uncertain if Tinder and other dating apps are here to stay, like Match.com and eHarmony, it is interesting to understand the anxiety that comes with introducing them to our society.
3 thoughts on “Tinder and New Media”
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I think it’s also interesting that we seem to be embracing platforms like Tinder a lot more than we had for Match.com or eHarmony. The social notion of sexual predators and all that almost seems to be a second thought. Could it possibly be because of the interface design of Tinder and how it is a lot more accessible on the go as opposed to sites like Match.com?
You’re observant in noting the change from the popularity of sites like Match.com to the more current dating apps of our generation. What interests me about this shift is why this new type of technology was created. As we discussed in class, each type of technology has affordances, and dating apps such as Tinder seem to allow the affordance to select quickly from a large pool of potential partners with no background info vs the Match.com standard of reading profiles and communicating based on more than just an image. What does this say about what types of technologies are seen as more necessary or “efficient”? Do we really want to be “efficient” when it come to relationships/interactions with others?
We’ll probably touch on the topic of online dating in the future, but I always find people’s reasoning behind not joining more interesting/amusing than the success stories. I think that in the past reservations were almost exclusively about the danger of meeting someone who is not the person represented online and that person’s motives, but now a lot of criticism is like your own–apps are impersonal so any potential relationship from them seems less meaningful. I personally avoid online dating services because I would worry about people I DO know in real life identifying me as a user, but I think that fear is probably one of the less common.