5 research outputs found
Roundtable: Affordances, Diversity, and Inclusion on Dating Apps - A Dialogue between Sociologists and Media Studies Researchers about âHingeâ
This roundtable paper is part of the project âDigitized Love and Intimacy on Hinge.â It aims to investigate how digital dating apps reconfigure cultural attitudes to love and intimacy and, conversely, how said attitudes influence digital dating practices. The conversation is informed by (n)ethnographic usage of the app. As algorithms and affordances of dating applications can implicitly or explicitly privilege certain groups of users and exclude others, this conversation mainly aims to make sense of how Hingeâs interface â or âaffordancesââ facilitates the dating process and how inclusive and diverse the applicationâs affordances are. We discuss that there is a contradiction between what Hinge portrays itself to be and what it practically ends up being, partly because of its affordances. This roundtable highlights the need to study affordances as relational technologies and to take the perceptions, ideas, and interpretations of users seriously alongside the actual features and designs offered by applications