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Abstract

In contemporary ‘platformised’ societies, digital businesses play a key role in producing and reproducing romantic cultures. In this article, we explore how the digital industry of dating has translated existing romantic cultures into datafied algorithmic infrastructures. We do so by looking at the interplay between the interconnected dimensions of a) existing mainstream cultures of love and sex, b) their datafication and codification into dating apps, and c) how the latter produce a new understanding of dating that is functional to create digital enclosures. Drawing on existing scholarly research as well as original qualitative data, we argue that dating apps reproduce dating as a de-romanticised social practice which is part of a digital lifestyle organised around a reputational logic.

Keywords

Platforms Tinder dating apps digital enclosure reputation

Introduction

In the last decade, we have witnessed a ‘seismic shift’ in the dimension of love and sex, grounded on societal changes concerning gender relations and the organisation of work, and pushed by the development of new technologies (Harrod et al., 2022; Kavka, 2022). This dynamic has been intensified during COVID-19, where a big part of the world population had to rely on technologically mediated forms of intimacy. If up until a few years ago, using the Internet to find potential romantic or sexual partners was stigmatised, nowadays it has become the norm for an increasing number of people across the world, and mostly for young adults in global cities (Ansari and Klinenberg, 2015; Bandinelli and Gandini, 2022; Evans and Riley, 2017; Gibbs et al., 2011). This is due to the rise of dating apps, which are becoming the primary gate to access the dimension of love and sex. This does not mean that people do not meet otherwise, but it surely signals the production of new ‘hybrid ecologies’ of dating, bridging physical and digital environments (Licoppe et al., 2016), and remediating characteristics ‘sexual scripts’ (Gagnon and Simon, 1974) while simultaneously creating new ones (Bandinelli C, (2022); Comunello et al., 2020).

Indeed, the contemporary dating scene is shaped by the massive intervention of the digital industry, which is codifying existing social and cultural experiences giving rise to what has been called the ‘platformised life’ (Van Dijck et al., 2018). Dating apps are the site where to study the cultural effects of platformisation on the spheres of love and sex, and this article sets out to explore this process by focusing on the junctions between technological means, cultural codes, and business imperatives. In this respect, this contribution relates to broader enquiries on the relationship between economy and society at the time of the commodification and corporate concentration of culture.

Economy and society are inextricably linked, as scholars Karl Polanyi (2014) and Fernand Braudel (1982) have helped us understand. Recent advancements in the business sector had a remarkable impact on society. It suffices to think of the role Uber played in the creation of the gig-economy (Woodcock and Graham, 2019), an entirely new form of production, consumption, and distribution. Drawing on management texts from the 1960s and 70s, Boltansky and Chiappello (2018) claimed capitalism had evolved to a new form – a new spirit to use their wording – one that was in tune with the libertarian and romantic currents of the period (as epitomised by dressed-down, cool capitalists such as Steve Jobs) that allowed to surpass the hierarchies of Fordist times. In their account, the radicalism of those decades, including activism and counter-culture (Brooks, 2010; Frank, 2006; Liu, 2016), were subsumed in a new paradigm of work and valorisation. The last decade has seen this process of cultural co-optation combined with the exploitation of technology, a nascent business opportunity which, starting from the late 90s, sought to innovate or reform existing services. In recent decades, the relationship between the business sector, technology, and society was pervaded by growing fears and high hopes alike: if everything could be digitalised, it meant that everything could be revolutionised, or lost, again.

Some critics argued that Web 2.0 and its further developments might be detrimental, and it could make us stupid (Carr, 2008), lonely (Turkle, 2011), or extremist (Lovink, 2007). In the circles of post-Marxist political economy, these changes in capitalism meant that the innermost parts of our individual and social life were put to work and exploited (Berardi, 2009). If some of these anxieties have partially waned in time, new concerns are emerging in relation to the platformisation of society. These relate to the extensive processes of data gathering, which are used for advertising purposes and social surveillance (Van Dijck, 2014), and are even more pressing when at stake are personal data as one’s sexual and romantic life (Myles, 2020).

In this article, we contribute to the research on love and sex and the cultural effects of their platformisation by building an analytical framework that accounts for the rise of dating apps across the three dimensions of culture, technology, and business. Taking Tinder as a case study, we focus on three main (logical and chronological) phases of its development. Firstly, we look at how it emerged as a digital translation of US college hook-up cultures, codified in the affordance of the swipe. Secondly, we focus on the ways in which the public’s reception of Tinder as misogynistic and encouraging commodified casual sex has led to a re-branding of the app as a means for de-sexualised social interactions. Thirdly, we consider how this is further implemented in Tinder’s most recent functions, that is, Tinder Coin and Swipe Party. Finally, reflecting on this excursus, we argue that datafication has turned dating into a reputational activity that serves to signal the participation to a dater’s lifestyle. This points at dating as a dimension deprived of an explicitly sexual and romantic nature and organised around a digital economy of reputation.

Our methodology is to integrate existing research from social, cultural, and media studies and put them in relation to original empirical data. These come from an ongoing ethnographic investigation about digital cultures of love in the UK and Italy, conducted by the main author of this article from 2017, and comprising over 45 interviews and 13 focus groups, alongside multiple informal conversations. More than half of the participants are white, middle-class, well-educated people aged 18 to 40. However, the fieldwork also involves people from diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds.

In terms of gender and sexual orientation, participants live a vast array of identity across the LGBTQIA + spectrum, but in what follows, given the focus on Tinder, we draw on interviews and focus groups conducted with heterosexual cis-gender men and women.¹ While this inevitably limits the reach of the contribution, we believe that a focus on heterosexual practices in the most diffused dating app may help to understand mainstream cultures of platformised dating. Importantly, we do not focus on the specificity of geographical contexts, but rather we look at the similarities of the experiences of participants in a trans-national Western perspective (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2008).

The platformisation of dating: From sex to reputation

Global dating app users rose from 198.6 million in 2015 to 250 million in 2021, (Curry, 2022). These are seen as predominantly based in urban context, often in the age brackets between 24 and 30, with higher education levels than those of non-app users, and relatively higher incomes when compared to the social average (Castro and Barrada, 2020). The dating app industry is worth approximately $3.06 billion, with a predicted growth of $10.87 billion in 2026.

While people have been using the Internet to find friends, lovers, and partners since the early nineties, it is only in the 2010s, with the launch of dating apps, that the phenomenon took a completely new dimension. Apps are a significant departure from the previous affordances that the web provided for those in search for a partner, love, or something else and have their origin in the startup boom when everything was being platformised (Van Dijck et al., 2018). The inception of this process is territorially rooted and took place in Silicon Valley, mostly under the influence of Apple, which locked a diversity of software applications (that still exist, also in web version) into a specific hardware and software ecosystem composed of smartphones equipped with haptic technology, geo-localisation tools, and user-friendly design. This has translated into a shift from the anonymous placeless spaces of the early consumer Internet, with its libertarian flair (Barlow, 1996) and its sense of freedom and cosmopolitanism (Silverstone, 2006), to the tracked, identity based, and heavily surveilled world of ‘platform capitalism’, in which cultural production is subsumed and datafied for the profit of global corporations (Srnicek, 2016).

The defining moment is when applications become pieces of software that can be accessed by the touch of a fingertip and would open entire worlds to the user. Together, different apps constitute a digital ecosystem in which each has its own function: an app to improve your running, one for monitoring fertility, one to talk privately to someone, one to shout to everyone, one to choose your furniture, one to buy it, one to do economic transactions etc. Each app is a rendition in software of a set of values infused by app founders, of the default thoughts of a developers’ team, their specific understanding of the social world, reflected into a set of features that aim at coping with competitors, and eventually altered by users’ feedback. In the remaining part of the article, we will try to look at this interplay in the case of dating apps.

Hook up culture and the launch of Tinder

The cultural elements underpinning the rise of Tinder, the first dating app for a straight public, are to be found in the diffusion of hook-up culture in the US college. To ‘hook up’ is an intentionally vague expression that is used to signal various degrees and kinds of intimacy. A ‘hook-up’ is a connection characterised by unrestrained informality, which could mean a range of things from the repression of intensity to the serendipitous character of an event. Its genealogy can be traced at the intersection of the sexual revolution coupled with the marketisation of love (Illouz, 2019; Kaplan and Illouz, 2022). Lisa Wade (2017), in her rich ethnographic study, recounts how hooking-up produced its own norms, and far from being experienced as a spontaneous act of freedom, it could well be felt like a social performance with a relatively rigid score. Drawing on interviews with college students, Wade shows that they are mostly aware of the place they are occupying in the marketised scene of hook-ups: they are aware if they are hooking-up ‘up’ or ‘down’, and of the consequences in terms of reputation. Some students say they perceive the ‘hook-up life’ as a social injunction and would pretend to have a carefree attitude while concealing all their loose emotional strings. Importantly, for some, participating in the hook-up scene was very difficult, or impossible, due to their character, or the social role they were assigned. At stake, there is an exclusionary dynamic in which only those with adequate capital could benefit from sexual ‘freedom’.

Interviews conducted among undergraduate students in the UK in 2018 and 2022 by the main author of this article corroborate this picture. Participants, especially women, explain that university life is very much associated with having casual sex, the experience of which is frequently coupled with the consumption of alcohol in the student union’s pub or other social spaces. When asked whether this is enjoyable, they did not hide their perplexity. Below an excerpt from a focus group conducted with female heterosexual students in their early twenties:

- The sex is often not very good

- Also, you don’t easily remember, you are often very drunk by the time you get laid!

- Well, ok, we get drunk because it is less scary… you know, you are less worried of being rejected

- Yeah. sex is not good… But it is nice when you get all prepped up with your girlfriends and then you talk about it the day after… and you make fun of the guys… that’s the nice part …

[…]

- It is difficult to just say no because it’s like a way to check if you are hot…and everybody does it so, I mean, it is not that you can just sit in a corner, right?

This brief conversation highlights the main malaise of college hook-up: 1) the perception of its (relative) inevitability, that is, the fact that while in principle one may opt out, it is a social practice that one is expected to engage with, primarily as a way to check one’s sexiness; 2) the fear of rejection, which is dealt with in various ways, including alcohol. Importantly, and we will go back on this point later, what seems to occupy a secondary position is sex, which is rarely a source of enjoyment in itself. What is enjoyable, the ‘nice part’, is the social dimension of the practice: the preparation with friends, and the aftermath of it, again, with friends. It looks like casual sex is more of a means to various ends – for example, conversation with friends, sense of belonging, and observation of social demands – than an end in itself.

Tinder has been launched to ‘solve’ or at last mitigate the backlashes of hook-up dating scenes. The interviews Tinder’s creators released in the early years, from 2014 to 2017, allow to reconstruct their motivation, as well as their position within the interplay of gender relationships on campus. The initial spark of the company which only 2 years later will have been generating billions of swipes is to be found in the fact that they felt partially excluded from the dating scene. Tinder co-founder Sean Rad, in an interview from 2017, says that, as a shy man, he felt quite uneasy in walking up to women:

‘One time I was sitting in a coffee shop with my friends and there was this girl across the room. I looked at her and she looked back, and I was like’, ‘Oh s---, she caught me looking at her. At first, I was nervous, but then I realized, wait a second. Now she looked at me, she smiled, and she sort of let me know she’s interested in talking and I no longer felt anxious. Then I started thinking about that and analysing it and realized that if you can eliminate the question of whether or not someone wants to meet you, then you would significantly take away the barriers to making a new connection. And that’s where the idea for Tinder came from’. (Shontell, 2017, emphasis added)

This passage clarifies that Tinder’s founders imagined the app to facilitate access and mitigate the risk of being excluded and rejected. Sociologically speaking, they occupied the position of highly educated white men with a conspicuous social capital but limited erotic capital (Green, 2008). At stake, there was their lack of reputation in the field, and insufficient mastery of the codes of dating. Dating apps’ affordances (re)construct sexual fields allowing the accumulation and communication of erotic and romantic capital by making explicit and quantifiable already existing social norms (Regan, 2021).

The main affordance that Tinder offers and relies on is the swiping function. Based on a haptic relationship with the medium, the ‘swipe’ gives automatic and instantaneous access to a digital plethora of potential partners. Importantly, it poses the user in the position of the evaluator, in a unilateral relationship with the others, who are framed as objects to evaluate. The swipe function is a very good example of how a technological function remediates a cultural code – signalling appreciation – while at the same time transforming it. The swipe allows only the signalling of two very opposite dispositions, either left or right, yes or no, or like or dislike (see also David and Cambre, 2016). This proceduralisation spares it from the flurry of doubts, and regrets, and is cast within a gamifying logic in which actions may not have consequences, or meaning, outside of the app (Garda and Karhulahti’s, 2019).

In an embodied context, let’s take the coffee shop in which Tinder’s co-founder anecdote takes place, if you look at someone they will notice it, and if they don’t reciprocate your look the situation may get awkward, people around you (friends) may witness this episode of rejection, and this may feel humiliating, or anyways discouraging. The app allows you to see only those who already signal appreciation, and this happens in the ‘private’ space of one’s profile. In this respect, it partially erases the need to be reciprocated. Moreover, the position of the swiper is one that, at one level, may be perceived as empowering, for each individual who swipes, there are many to be swiped. Of course, being a swiper means you also become an object of the other’s swiping, but this is something that the single user does not experience directly, it is concealed by the affordances of the app.

In the moment of swiping, one can occupy the absolute position of the one who chooses. Tinder has brought to the table a business idea which promises to revolutionise sexual and romantic life by offering the possibility to access and negotiate with the dimension of dating without being exposed to the humiliation of being rejected, and at the same time enjoying an unrestricted freedom to reject.

The ‘dating apocalypse’

Most media commentary connected Tinder’s rapid swiping and gamified dynamics with the commodified immediacy of casual sex. Tinder, and dating apps in general, was perceived as exacerbating online dating’s ‘relationshopping’ (Heino et al., 2010), promoting a hypersexualised culture (Van Hooff, 2020). They triggered what Albury calls ‘Tinder panic’ a ‘genre of popular reporting’ that points at the attempt to shift the approach towards casual sex and heterosexuality (Albury, 2017: 82). Possibly, the piece that best represents this wave of moral panic is the viral article that journalist Nancy Jo Sales published in Vanity Fair, titled ‘Tinder and the Dawn of the “Dating Apocalypse”’ (Sales, 2015). The association with a moralising view of casual sex as related to danger and promiscuity countered the company’s core business proposition and, as we will see, produced significant changes in the public statements of Tinder and its overall strategy.

The discontents caused by Tinder were also related to continuous episodes of sexual harassment denounced by women. A deeper look at the context in which the app was created may offer further insights on this re-codification of misogynist behaviour. The app was founded by two white men in their 20s, studying at the University of Southern California (USC); its initial critical mass was provided by the so-called ‘Greek life’ on USC’s campus, which consists of fraternities and sororities, well known for their rich and elitist social life. Often associated with goliardic and excessive alcohol consumption, they are also known for providing alternative ways to gain social capital for its members.² These groups have often been accused of toxic, if not utterly illegal, behaviour.³ While causal links cannot be inferred from correlations, these contextual elements contribute to outline the process of translation between sociocultural and technological codes, however ambiguous, opaque, and unintended this may be. The misogyny of Tinder’s interactions is a product and example of the processes of racialisation and sexualisation by which those who did not conform to the hegemonic identity of the white heterosexual and wealthy male have been marginalised from mainstream’s digital culture and economy (see, for instance, D’Ignazio and Klein, 2020).

Tinder was not the only company to suffer from this widespread perception of the industry. The whole sector contributed to a redefinition of dating apps away from a hook-up culture that was no longer benefiting from public approval and that more often than not involved forms of gendered violence. In 2016, OK Cupid launched a famous commercial campaign aimed at redefining the acronym DTF (Down to Fuck), associated with casual and potentially exploitative sexual encounters amongst heterosexual people. The campaign, shot by artists Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, features queer couples engaged in everything but sex. The F word is replaced with desexualised alternatives such as ‘fifty-five-hour binge,’ ‘filter out the far right’, and ‘forget our baggage’ (Smiley, 2018). Another example is Bumble that, launched as the ‘feminist dating app’, in explicit contrast with Tinder’s encoded misogyny, released new features such as Bizz and BFF aimed at enriching one’s professional network and one’s group of friends, respectively.

Whether Bumble’s affordances are empowering for women may very well be subject to debate, and one may discuss what happens to ‘feminism’ once it is digitally coded (see, for instance, McLeod and McArthur, 2019); yet, the success of Bumble nonetheless signals a dialectic process between romantic cultures, users’ feedback, and business logics. However, while at the level of marketing and cultural positioning, Tinder and Bumble differ and – to an extent – compete, and they are both part of the same tech conglomerate, the IAC Match Group, which owns 45 dating sites, including the very popular dating app Hinge (Bown, 2022).

Issues around harassment and misogynistic behaviour are still very central in the experience of dating apps. Most participants considered Tinder the riskier app, but a number of bad stories that happened also on Hinge and Bumble were recorded during fieldwork. To tackle this ongoing problem, Tinder is rolling out its own in-app currency, Tinder Coin, which is aimed, according to Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg’s recent declarations (Culliford, 2021), at educating the younger generations who have little or no experience of dating and incentivise virtuous behaviour. Incentives and calculation of online behaviour have been used for a long time in online communities, but the fact that this is now implemented on a dating app is revealing of a business model’s development, especially if we consider Nyborgs’s previous experience as Head of Apple subscription department.

Ok Cupid’s DTF campaign, Bumble, and Tinder Coin illustrate three ways in which the digital industry of dating has reacted to users' feedback and the public opinion. DTF aims at a cultural resignification that explicitly plays at a semantic level, for it tries to change the discourses associated with the app; Bumble is the result of a process of digital innovation which transforms social issues into market opportunities; Tinder Coin is the explicit attempt to regulate the conduct of users via a gamified system of bonuses and maluses organised within an intra-platform ethical economy. These processes exemplify how digital affordances codify and datafy cultural values and social norms.

Down to swipe

As we have seen, the narrative surrounding Tinder shifted towards sourcing potential (sexual) partners to enabling more general social interactions. This, of course, does not mean people on Tinder are not interested in sex. They may be, but they may also be interested in a vast array of other things. This creates a degree of confusion. Most Tinder users who participated in the fieldwork lamented a lack of transparency and clarity in the app. People who wanted to seek a serious relationship are frustrated when confronted with the lack of commitment of other users; those who look for casual sex hesitate to make that clear; those who make that clear are perceived as offensive; and there is the overall sense that people on Tinder are just there to mess around and ‘have fun’.

During interviews and informal conversations, research participants shared details on how one can ‘have fun’ with Tinder. ‘You are there with your mates, you swipe and laugh’ summarises Valentine. Claire says that ‘it is fun to just write the most absurd things to all these guys in the app and just see what they reply’. Valentine and Claire are both in their early twenties, and their example is quite representative of what most female participants of their age would say about their use of the app. Lawrence and Elisa, both in their mid-thirties, routinely organise ‘Tinder salads’, a meal in which they would swipe on each other’s behalf. They do so as a way to share ‘tips and tricks’, or just making fun of the people in the app. Stefano, an Italian man who at the time of the interview lived in the North of England, would check and amend his profile with the help of his friends. Sometimes, issues regarding one’s profile or the number of matches would become conversation pieces during a night out. Groups of friends, especially women, set up WhatsApp groups to exchange the most hilarious interactions. This dimension of togetherness may also be understood as a way to exorcise the fear of rejection and the anxiety over one’s perceived desirability.

It does not come as a surprise that this version of Tinder as a game one plays with friends is being formalised. According to code found in the app (Mott, 2022), the new ‘Swipe Party’ function will let friends help people swipe. To be sure, there has always been a social dimension to dating, and friendship has always been mediated also by the sharing of one’s intimate life. What is of interest is that this can be achieved without the need of an embodied encounter; it can be produced entirely within the app. At stake, there is the sharing of one’s personal romantic and sexual life which appropriates and datafies existing social dynamics.

Swipe Party and Tinder Coin are indicative of the ways in which the industry is moving towards the construction of dating as a dimension that is not necessarily related to love and sex but rather aimed at performing a certain status within the app. By being on the app, individuals participate in the dimension of dating to the extent that they perform the act of looking for someone, digitally translated into swiping. They do not need to engage in sexual and romantic encounters to achieve that. A large survey involving 6458 participants’ worldwide report that in fact only 14% look for sex and 19% for a partner (Lin, 2022). Recent studies across different disciplines concur in saying that users’ motivations connect to a plurality of reasons with ‘entertainment’ and ‘fun’ being one of the prevalent, alongside the search of self-validation and self-esteem (Bandinelli and Bandinelli, 2021; Ranzini and Lutz, 2016; Sumter and Vandenbosch, 2018; Ward, 2016).⁴ After all, the fact that dating app’s users are not primarily oriented towards sex and love makes a lot of sense from a business viewpoint, for those are goals that resides outside the app, while the app’s survival depends on its ‘stickiness’ (Kim et al., 2016), that is, the ability to retain the users within itself.

Considering the founding connection between dating apps and casual sex, the subordination of sex may seem counterintuitive. However, it is the result of a close intertwinement of cultural values, business logic, and media agency. At a cultural level, the last 10 years have seen a partial debasing of casual sex. This is due to a series of factors. Firstly, the increased awareness of the patriarchal structure underpinning (most) casual sex, let’s think, for instance, of the impact of #metoo and the consequent debates over the political, ethical, and legal aspects of sex (Angel, 2021; Srinivasan, 2021). Secondly, we must account for the rising anxiety over the future that takes a toll on Gen Z and millennials, making them substantially less interested in sex than previous generations (Maxted, 2018; Olonisakin, 2018). Finally, as we have seen, fears of rejection and exclusionary boundaries have eventually discouraged many young people to actively participate in hook-up cultures.

Dating apps can come to the rescue insofar as they offer disembodied access to the hook-up dating scene, mitigating the humiliation of rejection and exclusion by means of gamifying affordances. The effect of gamification produces dating as a practice in which users could automatically access a certain position in the scene, while at the same time being relieved from the embodied outcome of their choices. Dating apps, and Tinder in particular, have codified the social and reputational dimension of hook-up, minus the actual sex. If we take seriously the brief discussion between young women reported above (p. 4–5), we can see how the app isolates the elements of hook-up cultures they found ‘nice’, that is, sharing with friends, signalling one’s participation in the scene, while removing the embodied sexual act. The datafied field of dating is therefore ‘digitally enclosed’, that is, subtracted from the public sphere and appropriated by a privately owned digital company (Andrejevic, 2007).

Dating as a digitally enclosed lifestyle

Processes of digital enclosure result in the production of a new technical standard, that is, a new habit and common sense concerning a specific sphere of thoughts and action. If, as Foucault has shown, sexual conduct changed forever because of the practice of confession (Foucault, 1978), we can now ask how sense-making takes place in a scenario in which choosing a partner is an algorithmically mediated practice, and the social demand to have a rich sexual and romantic life can be negotiated within the affordances of the app. While it is well beyond the scope of this article to answer this question, we would like to move a step in this direction, arguing the digitally enclosed sphere of dating is rooted on the accumulation of reputational capital, in terms of number of matches, messages, swipes, or eventually, even coins. Dating apps produce dating as a digitally enclosed lifestyle, a commodified and aestheticized activity that is used to signal belonging to a scene and project status within the app. Dating as a digitally enclosed lifestyle is a de-romanticised and reputational activity.

The term ‘de-romanticised’ conveys the secondary position that sex and love occupy within dating app culture. With this, we do not mean to counter argue claims about the hyper-sexualisation of culture, nor do we intend to deny that people seek and find love through the app. Rather, we wish to point out that sex and love are not at the core of what people do with dating apps. What is at the core, instead, is the accumulation of reputation and status in the public digital space that the app offers. Being on a dating app, one can experience themselves as a person who dates, without dating. One can have a sense of one’s attractiveness without incurring in rejections and can signal this to others via matches. This is consistent with the logic of digital sociality, which is organised around the accumulation and measurement of social capital. What apps have co-opted of the dating scene is the extent in which that is a social practice that has to do with status. The dimension of romance, for the better of worse, is foreclosed and concealed, when not actively avoided.

Conclusion

In this article, we have looked at dating apps to unpack the ways in which algorithmically powered infrastructures codify and remediate existing romantic cultures, while at the same time producing new cultural codes because of datafied user feedback. Drawing on existing research, secondary sources, and empirical data, we reconstructed and analysed key moments in the development of Tinder. In doing so, we have unpacked the relation between technological capabilities, business necessities, and cultural inputs, to offer some exploratory reflections on the marking traits of platformised heterosexual cultures of dating. Drawing on this, we formulated the argument that the triangular dialectic of sociocultural codes, technological tools, and business imperatives is re-defining dating as a de-romanticised reputational activity that unfolds within the space of the app as a digitally enclosed lifestyle.

This has a duplicitous origin and function. On the economic level, it is instrumental to make the app sticky, that is, to retain customers. At the level of culture, it allows the subject to negotiate with the social injunction to have a vibrant dating life, obeying and disregarding it at the same time. By simply being on the apps, people can signal their participation in the dating scene for they can be seen as performing the ‘labour of love’ but without actually choosing and having to confront the possibility of failure. They can partake to the lifestyle associated with dating, its aesthetic and consumeristic connotations, but engaging with it only digitally.

This sheds light on the fact that platformised romance does not build on the co-optation of love and sex in their erotic and embodied dimension but rather on the remediation of their reputational logic. What can be technically reproduced is not the event of love, neither is it the embodied sexual encounter, but only their commodified version as a form of capital.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Alberto Cossu

Notes

Carolina Bandinelli is an associate professor in media and creative industries at Warwick’s Centre for Media Cultural and Policy Studies. Her research is concerned with emerging forms of subjectivity and sociality in the digital culture industries. In recent years, she has been looking at digital cultures of love from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her monograph, Social Entrepreneurship and Neoliberalism: Making Money While Doing Good, is published by Rowman and Littlefield International (2020).

Alberto Cossu is a sociologist and media scholar whose research is concerned with art and creative work; collaborative and digital economies; with a focus on the organisational processes and new forms of value creation that he studies combining qualitative and digital methods. He currently works as an assistant professor in media and communication within the School of Media, Communication, and Sociology at the University of Leicester where he is the Programme Director for the MA in Digital Media & Society. He has published on several peer-reviewed journals, and his first monograph, Autonomous Art Institutions – Artists Disrupting the Creative City, is due to appear in June 2022 for Rowman and Littlefield International.

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Bye bye romance,welcome reputation: An analysis of the digital enclosure of dating

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

The platformisation of dating: From sex to reputation

Hook up culture and the launch of Tinder

The ‘dating apocalypse’

Down to swipe

Dating as a digitally enclosed lifestyle

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References