In the beginning my motivation was rather simple: I was bitter. So, fueled by bitterness, and a need for a research topic, I decided to make what I assumed was the guilty party of this mentality the subject of my project. As my interviews went on, however, I began to notice something interesting: all of us, at least my respondents and I, seemed to feel the exact same way about Tinder. And yet here we were, still taking up to 30 minutes out of each of our days to swipe left and right mindlessly.
That is when I realized what was really going on, which is what has become my main focus on this project. In this paper I discuss this question of precarious human connection, using Tinder as the lens for which I looked at casual dating.
For my research, I interviewed 10 people. This term was used by some of my initial interviewees, and it seemed to be the most understood way to phrase this differentiation later on. My questions during our interview sessions ranged from simple Tinder use questions β when did you start using Tinder?
How much time do you spend on it per day? How do you see your dating life in the future? My goal was to encourage my respondents to think more critically about their Tinder use and how it either affects or is affected by other aspects of their life and their understandings of popular culture. To a lesser degree, these kinds of questions also allowed me to see how the layout of Tinder mirrors real life interactions.
Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, two Los Angeles based tech entrepreneurs, first launched Tinder in the fall of for the iPhone, but the app grew to include androids as well in the summer of The app was originally created to target college students aged 18 to 24 and was intended to mimic the way people flirt with each other at bars.
