sociotechnicalmap

Appearance, name, age, career, current geographic distance from you —— these are the fundamental information on a Tinder user’s profile. But to be very honest, there’s only one of them is the certain true information: the location. As Tinder doesn’t do any ID authentication like Facebook, so basically you could be anyone out there, performing as another identity. But you couldn’t fake your geographic location.

And last year, Tinder even launched Place, which shows the places you have been to. It seems like Tinder is trying so hard to let people find common ground (literally) with potential matches.

Does it really work? Is it a good or bad idea?
I think geographic location is a massive private information bomb. It tells where we live, where we work/study, where we hang out - basically it shows our lives. To some extent, I understand why Tinder put up the location information: if you two live close, there’s more potential you’ll meet up with each other; if you two work/study in the same area/institution, it’s more likely that you’ll have something in common.

But I would still swipe left for this function. One one hand, it’s just a bit too much private information for someone who is just potentially going to get to know me on line. The locations of a person’s ‘living areas’ are like the individual’s sovereign zone. If there’s somebody pries into my zone without my awareness and consent, I would feel a bit insecure, even offended.

On the other hand, would the person’s location really affect whether I’m interested in him or not? Well, if I’m looking for a partner, no, I don’t care where he lives, I care about his personalities and our interaction more. However, if I’m looking for a friend of benefit, yes, living close to each other and convenience to commuting is quite a big benefit. Therefore, comparing these two kind of relationship, we can tell that the behaviour of showing geographic information on Tinder profile tends to instrumentalize our relationships. And it becomes another evidence (apart from the appearance-centred selection criteria) revealing the fact that Tinder is more like a hook-up app, rather than a reliable dating app.

And from my personal experience, I had matched with a guy whose profile shown he’s 2km away from me, after some conversation I don’t really like him so I rejected to meet him in person, but he was still trying to persuade me. Then one day, I came across this guy at the bus stop near the campus. And there’s one second that we saw each other. I’d seen his photos, so I known it’s him, but I didn’t know him - although we’d texted pretty ‘intimate messages’, but still, it’s not the situation that I could just step up and say hi to him. In fact, until I got on the bus, I kept my head down to avoid him seeing my face. In the end, I wasn’t sure whether he had recognized me or not. But I did deleted the conversation with him on Tinder, right after I got on the bus. This experience was just so wired and awkward. After that I more tended to match with people located in a farther location. Because a bigger chance to encounter people you like means there’s also a bigger chance to run into people you don’t like.

From a bigger picture, quantifying an individual’s feature is a controversial characteristic of the dating app’s algorithm. Like the geometrical location, some data/information is more ‘realistic’ than we thought. And sometimes this could break the balance (or saying boundary) between the digital world and the physical world, which could be surprising, or scary. (And I didn’t use the words ‘virtual world’ and ‘reality world’ here, because I reckon for the dating app cases, it’s also reality even it’s on the digital platform. Just there’s a boundary between the ‘digital stage’ and the ‘physical stage’. People need to be aware of this boundary, and consider when and how to step across/ back the boundary, depends on individuals situation.)

Mapbox, 2018. Tinder Places: match with maps [WWW Document]. Points of interest. URL https://blog.mapbox.com/tinder-places-match-with-maps-2278c5fc376b (accessed 2.26.19).

Mazali, T. (2011). Social Media as a New Public Sphere. Leonardo, 44(3), pp.290-291.