Why Swipe Right? An ethnographic exploration of how college students use Tinder

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2015
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Sociology & Anthropology
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Thesis (B.A.)
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en_US
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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This thesis visits the question of how and why college students use the smartphone dating app Tinder using a series of interviews I conducted with Tinder users. I argue that the theory of the “tourist gaze” provides an apt metaphor for initially understanding how these students use the “swipe” on the app to objectify and consume the presentations of others. It is in this first stage of using the app where informants can most cleanly distance their own actions from the exacting (and instrumentalizing) gaze they use to judge the presentations – and what I term the embodied habitus – of other users’ profiles on the app. Through acting on the app as a tourist is encouraged to do while on holiday, Tinder users treat others as one treats objects and in accordance with the logic of consumptive capitalism. In the process, this gaze allows them to separate themselves from the stigma of using an online dating platform.
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