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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Deborah ChambersORCiD
This is the authors' accepted manuscript of a book chapter that has been published in its final definitive form by Routledge, 2021.
For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
By asking how geolocational dating is algorithmically steered, this chapter explains how dating app practices signal a new kind of mobile sociality. With an accent on dating app platform infrastructures and on women and LGBTQ+ users, it considers whether dating apps empower mobility practices, and if so, in what ways. Mobile dating apps comprise a synthesis of technical, bodily and symbolic attributes. First, they encompass temporal features by imparting a sense of speed and immediacy in selecting matches. second, the GPS location capabilities of dating apps involve spatial and temporal tracing, mapping and tracking of nearby strangers to coordinate physical co-presence. Third, observing and connecting with strangers requires dating app users to navigate transformed public-private boundaries. These attributes involve critical decisions about self-presentation and the competences to gauge strangers' identities and motives in co-situated virtual and physical spaces. The concept of 'hybrid space' (de Souza e Silva, 2006) enables us to approach these digital, temporal and geographical elements of the dating app ecology as hybridised features of online-offline connectedness. Within a process of physical and digital hybridisation (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2012), these techno-social dating app qualities entail situated, bodily and emotional qualities, confirming that material and virtual space are no longer separate. As such, they suggest a dramatic reorganisation of social connectedness described here as geo-enabled mobile sociality.
Author(s): Chambers D
Editor(s): Annette Hill, Maren Hartmann, Magnus Andersson
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: Published
Book Title: The Routledge Handbook of Mobile Socialities
Year: 2021
Pages: 101 - 114
Print publication date: 07/05/2021
Online publication date: 07/05/2021
Acceptance date: 08/09/2020
Edition: 1
Series Title: Routledge Handbook, Society and culture; media studies; cultural studies; politics, society and education
Number of Volumes: 1
Publisher: Routledge
Place Published: Oxford
URL: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003089872
DOI: 10.4324/9781003089872
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9780367543976
