Tinder: Can you really find love on an app?
The Tinder Profile: a space where you can provide your first name, age, 9 pictures, a job title, educational institution, and 500 characters of your own wit and charm to inform potential romantic partners about who you are. Users make split second judgements about their potential matches based on very limited information, often getting into almost rhythmic patterns of swiping left (no) or right (yes). Is that much information enough to let you know you might be interested in someone? Many times, users also struggle with knowing that someone’s self-provided information is truly accurate.
Then again, in a highly digital world how much information could you find out about this person if you really tried? While I don’t often publicly admit this, I am oftentimes the person that my friends ask to be “their personal FBI agent”: I find out information about their romantic partners online. This has included everything from current and past partners to Zillow “Zestimates” of how much their houses are worth (in my defense that one was only one time and for a very specific reason). Oftentimes these results stem from just a connection on Snapchat or Instagram. What I’ve learned from these experiences is that a lot of information out there about everyone… if you take the time to find it.
As our infosphere and cyberspace continue to expand exponentially, the friction that previously made these sorts of things difficult to find has drastically decreased. Other kinds of friction like paywalls still serve as obstacles, but many people can find ways around these if they have the right technological skills. Resources about information access and ICTs reducing friction are provided below(1).
There has also been some talk about receiving “tinder Elo scores”, a phenomenon in which Tinder rates the quality of your profile based on the quality of people who like your profile. Tinder disputes this, claiming it was once a practice and is no longer included in their algorithm, however many users doubt this is entirely true. At what point would this algorithm become helpful or hurtful? Are your chances of finding what you’re looking for increased just simply by being on Tinder as compared to relying on more traditional methods? What gives Tinder the authority to make decisions for you? See references to read more about tech power (2).
References
Floridi, Luciano. (2010). Chapter 1 Ethics after the Information Revolution. In The. Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Castells, M. (2007). Communication, Power and Counter-power in the Network Society. International journal of communication, 1(1), 29.
