Love at first swipe? Explaining Tinder self-presentation and motives
The Research done in this paper is extremely helpful towards my study. By giving out a 12 minute survey to a large group of people they intended to understand self-presentation through the app Tinder while controlling for things such as loneliness, self-esteem and narcissism. The results showed that those with higher self-esteem are much less likely to engage in falsifying their profiles. Stating on page ten that “…Users with more self-esteem portray themselves in a more authentic fashion,”(Ranzini,10) By looking at the presentation of self we can begin to better understand the different ways in which Tinder is used and its impacts on people’s self esteem. As we will later read in my interviews with my respondents, people tend to have more authentic profiles on Tinder because there is a much greater potential that you will meet this person in real life. “…it is precisely the potential of a future encounter that drives individuals towards an authentic self-presentation,”(Ranzini,5).
Navigating online identities can be confusing and oftentimes misleading. While at the same time a specific affordance of TInder is that you will be more likely to find authentic representations of self. This is due to a number of things, the first being the latter mentioned above, the second being the connection with Facebook. By creating a network that exists across social media sites there is more verification of someone’s personality and looks.
Other affordances mentioned in this particular research were “…portability, availability, locatability, and multimediality,”(Ranzini,2). By this the author is speaking about the frequency in which you have the potential of meeting new people online because of the large collection of users on Tinder. Availability meaning that there is likely a lot of people within your age range and with similar interests that will be available for a face to face meeting. Locality speaks to the unique feature of Tinder which allows you to find people within a certain locale of miles that you have the ability to widen or lessen. This affordance ensures that you look at people online that are close by and thus increase the likelihood of a face to face interaction. And lastly, multimediality is what I mentioned in the previous paragraph which is that Tinder crosses a few different barriers of social media. Not only is facebook required to have in order to use the app but you are also able to link your Instagram profile to yours on Tinder. This allows for a much larger range of photographs and adds another layer of authenticity. Making a fake facebook and producing organic seeming photos on instagram to create a fake Tinder profile seems very over the top and is unlikely for someone to commit to.