TINDER

By Austin Shepard Woodruff

A principal goal for most cultures, both implicitly suggested by their social structure and explicitly enforced by certain norms, is to successfully develop relationships with one’s surrounding cohort. In general people are expected to establish and cultivate working and sustainable connections with one’s immediate and extended families, one’s peers, one’s coworkers and employers, as well as to be more or less receptive to meeting new people somewhere between or outside of these categories. While there is a great deal of variety in the degrees to which these expectations are fulfilled and enforced, the pressure to relate to other people remains a steady driving influence on cultural life, and on our American bourgeois culture today in particular. The obligation to be social in distinct modes of interaction is in turn confirmed by the mythologies with which we surround ourselves, mythologies which then we perpetuate to engender the others around us. Folded into an historical narrative weaving together nationalism, capitalism, and post-structuralism, we can understand the social media game Tinder by taking a closer look at the presuppositions of the urgent need to connect with others on which the platform finds its ground.

Within the context of the contemporary obsession with technology and social media it comes as no surprise that we have come up with many ways of interacting online through various platforms, rather than in person, to satisfy these needs to connect with one another. Social technology does not alleviate the need to relate to other human beings; Tinder, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram instead all function as media through which we can satisfy this social drive. These platforms mark the need to relate to each other in their overabundance of information, in the constant updating about the status of the others around us in the world. Thereby we set into practice an economy of information, valuing not only how relevant something is to a contemporary context, but also taking into consideration the magnitude of the information surge, putting high value in large quantities of tiny, easily digestible morsels of social exchange. However, inasmuch as human contact is an imperative we set upon ourselves, this urge manifests in strange and inelegant ways that call into question the very need to connect, online or in person, in the first place. The social media platform Tinder represents a modern insecurity in our abilities to connect with one another on levels beyond the superficial pretense of social life; the performances we play out in our characters demand of ourselves and everyone else that we be polite, presentable, and follow a guideline of cues in order to successfully develop socially appropriate relationships.

Tinder first and foremost is a game. While other online platforms offer users media which essentially function as texts to be read, shared, and otherwise observed in a distant, banal sense of the word, Tinder presents the worlds of other people as opportunities to make evaluative choices based on profiles consisting of a few pictures, some mutual interests, and a couple lines of text. One plays this game by swiping right or up on the phone screen to indicate interest/ hyper interest or swiping left to indicate disinterest. Based on anywhere from hardly a second or two to several minutes of consideration, one makes the choice to express their approval or disapproval of the profile on trial. The consequence for mutual interest is a connection on the platform, where the two parties may interact via standard text share, while the consequence for neither parties indicating interest is merely an absence of connection (no consequence). To play the game effectively one must present oneself in the most efficiently interesting manner possible, balancing carefully between the small portion of text and the couple pictures of oneself. Cultural instinct and the ability to instantly read into the social mythologies in place therefore take precedence in this economy of the profile.

The profile picture of a young smiling woman surrounded by other young smiling women at what appears to be a birthday party becomes an overtly obvious message that carries to the recipient the social value of this person in question. This person appears to be not only sociable, but apparently very successful in her relationships with her friends; the picture becomes a kind of evidence to convince the observer of her social prowess. Valued highly by the game, this player could typically expect attention from the other players, depending on the social context in which they currently play. Yet this attention validates a profound distance between the players, who in reality are interacting with their phones rather than with the other person, even though these signals somehow constitute normal interaction in our world.

This model of presentation speaks directly to the role that mythology plays in modern life, and Roland Barthes in the book Mythologies affirms this in writing that “the function of a myth is to empty reality” (255). What can one possibly express on such a limited scale about the whole of one’s entire life? And what does this premium on our lives mean for the connections that follow? It is always readily apparent that the groundwork for any further interaction between players of the game is based on a mere swipe, an action of interest in the minimal information given in the users’ profiles. In the capitalist sense of the interaction, we are selling ourselves as products to one another, and the obvious desire is acceptance manifested in the act of swiping right, or touching the green heart button. The language of the game, both visual and verbal, is a form of speech, and Barthes testifies to the mythological nature of precisely such presentation in saying that “speech of this kind is a message” (218). The visual elements thus  capitalize on the cues that we send to one another to assure our social worth; physical attractiveness, style of photography, other characters in the pictures, relative wealth, and geographical context (with famous monuments) thereby all become mythologized into a profile whose ultimate goal is to appear as desirable as possible.