While online spaces and communities were once seen to transcend geography, the ubiquity of location-aware mobile devices means that today’s online interactions are deeply intertwined with offline ...places and relationships. Systems such as online dating applications for meeting nearby others provide novel social opportunities, but can also complicate interaction by aggregating or “co-situating” diverse sets of individuals. Often this aggregation occurs across traditional spatial or community boundaries that serve as cues for self-presentation and impression formation. This paper explores these issues through an interview study of Grindr users. Grindr is a location-aware real-time dating application for men who have sex with men. We argue that co-situation affects how and whether Grindr users and their behavior are visible to others, collapses or erases contextual cues about normative behavior, and introduces tensions in users’ self-presentation in terms of their identifiability and the cues their profile contains relative to their behavior.
Every interpersonal relationship always goes through a stage of reducing uncertainty so that an interpersonal relationship can develop. This includes interpersonal relationships in online dating ...applications. This study examines the strategies used by female users to reduce the uncertainty in online dating application Bumble. Bumble was chosen as it’s the only online dating application that put woman in charge to make the first move. Uncertainty reduction theory was used to analyse the findings. Three informants were interviewed and literature studies from previous studies in similar topics were used to gain further information. The result shows that each informant has different approach and strategies to reduce the uncertainty while using online dating application Bumble. The strategies help each informant to decide whether to continue or stop the interaction while using Bumble.
Whether humans drive technology or technology capable of moving human life systems is still a debate and a contradiction in the thinking of some humans. Technological progress in Indonesia itself ...cannot be denied. What is feared is that the diversity of cultures and languages in Indonesia is threatened with extinction. One of the cultures that used to be felt in Indonesia was the culture of finding a mate. In ancient times, searching for a mate used traditional methods or more thick and trusting through elements of the surrounding culture and customs. However, with the development of technology began to erode the custom of finding a mate, which was replaced by technology's role. In this study, researchers focused on how technology replaces the role of culture, customs, and religion in finding someone's mate using social media applications. The theory used is to use determinism technology theory, which tries to prove that technology is starting to replace humans' role. This study took interviews with eight female informants from different ethnicities, religions, and ages. This study indicates that human trust in technology is now greater than the culture or customs that are still held firmly by the Indonesian people.
•First study to explore emerging adults’ motivation to use the dating app Tinder.•Motivations included Love, Casual Sex, Ease of Communication, Thrill of Excitement.•Tinder motivations meaningfully ...related to offline encounters with Tinder matches.•Tinder is more than a fun, hookup app without any strings attached.
Although the smartphone application Tinder is increasingly popular among emerging adults, no empirical study has yet investigated why emerging adults use Tinder. Therefore, we aimed to identify the primary motivations of emerging adults to use Tinder. The study was conducted among Dutch 18–30year old emerging adults who completed an online survey. Over half of the sample were current or former Tinder users (n=163). An exploratory factor analysis, using a parallel analysis approach, uncovered six motivations to use Tinder: Love, Casual Sex, Ease of Communication, Self-Worth Validation, Thrill of Excitement, and Trendiness. In contrast to previously suggested, the Love motivation appeared to be a stronger motivation to use Tinder than the Casual Sex motivation. In line with literature on online dating, men were more likely to report a Casual Sex motivation for using Tinder than women. In addition, men more frequently reported Ease of Communication and Thrill of Excitement motives. With regard to age, the motivation Love, Casual Sex and Ease of Communication were positively related to age. Finally, Tinder motivations were meaningfully related to offline encounters with Tinder matches. In sum, the study showed that emerging adults have six primary motivations to use Tinder and that these motivations differ according to one’s age and gender. Tinder should not be seen as merely a fun, hookup app without any strings attached, but as a new way for emerging adults to initiate committed romantic relationships. Notably, the findings call for a more encompassing perspective on why emerging adults use Tinder.
The present study was conducted to explore the cognitive processes linking people's perceptions of their mobile dating app experience and their intention to commit infidelity. Three hundred and ...ninety-five participants were recruited through a U.S. based university (44.6%) and MTurk (55.4%). Our results indicate that people's perceived success on a dating app was positively associated with their intention to commit infidelity through self-perceived desirability, and negatively associated with their intention to commit infidelity through perceived amount of available partners. These findings are discussed in light of theories of relational investment.
•395 participants completed a survey on their dating app use.•Dating app success was indirectly associated with intention to cheat.•Self-perceived desirability positively predicted users' intention to cheat.•Perceived number of partners negatively predicted users' intention to cheat.
Love and Empire Schaeffer, Felicity Amaya
12/2012, Letnik:
11
eBook
The spread of the Internet is remaking marriage markets, altering the process of courtship and the geographic trajectory of intimacy in the 21st century. For some Latin American women and U.S. men, ...the advent of the cybermarriage industry offers new opportunities for re-making themselves and their futures, overthrowing the common narrative of trafficking and exploitation. In this engaging, stimulating virtual ethnography, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer follows couples' romantic interludes at Vacation Romance Tours, in chat rooms, and interviews married couples in the United States in order to understand the commercialization of intimacy. While attending to the interplay between the everyday and the virtual, Love and Empire contextualizes personal desires within the changing global economic and political shifts across the Americas. By examining current immigration policies and the use of Mexican and Colombian women as erotic icons of the nation in the global marketplace, she forges new relations between intimate imaginaries and state policy in the making of new markets, finding that women's erotic self-fashioning is the form through which women become ideal citizens, of both their home countries and in the United States. Through these little-explored, highly mediated romantic exchanges, Love and Empire unveils a fresh perspective on the continually evolving relationship between the U.S. and Latin America.
Matching algorithms are a central feature of online dating, yet little research exists on their effectiveness—or people’s perceptions of their effectiveness—for recommending a mate. Accordingly, this ...study explores the effects of people’s beliefs in the legitimacy of algorithms on their first date with an online dating partner. Longitudinal survey data were collected from online dating participants leading up to and following the first date. Findings suggested that whether algorithms actually worked mattered less than whether participants had the perception that they worked for finding a partner. Moreover, participants reported better first dates to the extent that they believed in the efficacy of the compatibility matching process. The results have implications for understanding the role of algorithms in shaping relationship success on and off the internet.
Exploring the interplay of love, money and threat in romance fraud, this Element reveals how language is used to persuade, manipulate, and threaten without causing alarm. It provides the first ...empirical examination of criminal interactions-in-action that exposes and tracks the grooming process and manipulation techniques from first contact with the fraudster, to the transition between romance and finance, and requests for money and intimate images, before morphing into explicit threats and acts of sextortion. Through the use of a range of interactional methodologies and real romance fraud messages, a new type of criminality in the form of 'romance fraud enabled sextortion' is revealed. The insights contained in this work have clear implications for future directions of academic exploration and practitioner efforts to protect the public. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The coronavirus disease-19 pandemic introduced a crisis of safety and relevance for dating apps, as their affordances for facilitating in-person encounters posed the risk of viral transmission. This ...article examines how eight apps primarily catering to heterosexual markets responded to the pandemic through changes to socio-technical arrangements, new user prescriptions, and the curation of corporate data and success stories. By analyzing corporate social media and promotional materials alongside in-app developments, we find that these companies reimagined app affordances to promote “virtual dating,” a set of practices and symbolic meanings that prioritize visual, synchronous digital interaction as the most responsible, reliable, and successful dating approach to the pandemic. Virtual dating centers apps as databases of potential partners while prescribing modes of use aimed toward affective relief, displays of authenticity, and romantic courtship. This reimagining counters moral panics about digitally mediated relationships by resorting to heteronormative dating scripts while overlooking alternative app uses.
PDF
