The Library
Dating apps : the uncertainty of marketised love
Tools
Bandinelli, Carolina and Gandini, Alessandro (2022) Dating apps : the uncertainty of marketised love. Cultural Sociology, 16 (3). pp. 423-441. doi:10.1177/17499755211051559 ISSN 1749-9763.
|
PDF
WRAP-Dating-apps-uncertainty-2022.pdf - Published Version - Requires a PDF viewer. Available under License Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0. Download (181Kb) | Preview |
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755211051559
Abstract
Dating apps promise a ‘digital fix’ to the ‘messy’ matter of love by means of datafication and algorithmic matching, realising a platformisation of romance commonly understood through notions of a market’s rationality and efficiency. Reflecting on the findings of a small-scale qualitative research on the use of dating apps among young adults in London, we problematise this view and argue that the specific form of marketisation articulated by dating apps is entrepreneurial in kind, whereby individuals act as brands facing the structural uncertainty of interacting with ‘quasi-strangers’. In so doing, we argue, dating app users enact a Luhmanian notion of interpersonal trust, built on the assessment of the risk of interacting with unfamiliar others that is typical of digitally mediated contexts dominated by reputational logics. From a sociocultural perspective, dating apps emerge as sociotechnical apparatuses that remediate the demand to rationally choose a partner while at the same time reproducing the (im)possibility of doing so. In this respect, far from offering a new form of efficiency, they (re)produce the ontological uncertainty (Illouz, 2019) that characterises lovers as entrepreneurs.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies > Centre for Cultural Policy Studies | ||||||||
SWORD Depositor: | Library Publications Router | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Cultural Sociology | ||||||||
Publisher: | SAGE Publications | ||||||||
ISSN: | 1749-9763 | ||||||||
Official Date: | September 2022 | ||||||||
Dates: |
|
||||||||
Volume: | 16 | ||||||||
Number: | 3 | ||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 423-441 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.1177/17499755211051559 | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Reuse Statement (publisher, data, author rights): | ** From Crossref journal articles via Jisc Publications Router ** History: epub 10-01-2022; issued 10-01-2022. | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 3 March 2022 | ||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 3 March 2022 |
Request changes or add full text files to a record
Repository staff actions (login required)
View Item |
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year