Ricerc@Sapienza

This entry defines dating apps and the related main theoretical approaches. The diffusion of geolocalized apps and the datafication of society affect dating culture, leading toward instantaneous relationships that can be arranged according to the proximity of the users. Mobile hookup or dating practices were experimented in the early 2000s and LGBTQi people have historically been early adopters. Nowadays dating apps are more socially accepted, even if some social stigma persists in specific cultural contexts.

LGBTQ people have made intensive use of digital media for their social interactions, having been among the first users to effectively explore the blurring boundaries between the online and the offline realms, with special regard to Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN) (de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2010). As Mowlabocus (2010a, p. 6) observes, ‘the web has always been used by gay men as a means by which physical interaction could be sought, negotiated and organized. Gay men’s digital spaces have historically provided an environment in which offline intimacies can be facilitated’.

The paper explores the perception and negotiation of gender representations and scripts among Italian dating app users. Adopting a gender perspective and a socio-technical framework, it describes how dating app affordances support the performance of gender scripts and explores how users negotiate gender scripts. We conducted 8 focus groups involving 39 dating app users from a variety of gender and sexual orientations. The results show how shared usage norms and practices disclose dominant gender scripts at play, and illustrate how some users try to subvert them.

In this paper, we address algorithmic imaginary, perception and tactics of Italian dating apps users. Little attention has hitherto been devoted to the ways in which the algorithms employed by mobile dating platforms (to rate users, to manage user visibility, to arrange results) might contrast, or enhance, people’s homophily. Our goal is to explore whether and how mobile dating algorithmsmodify the perception of what we define as “relational filter bubbles”; and whether, and how, users believe dating algorithms reshape (extend or limit) the heterogeneity of their intimate interactions.

Identità e relazione sono, per la loro intrinseca polisemia, due concetti difficili da cristallizzare. Si tratta di categorie interpretative fondamentali per diverse discipline, che rimandano a dimensioni ontologiche ed epistemologiche profonde ed estremamente interconnesse. Nel corso del tempo, in funzione della diversa complessità sociale e culturale (oltre che del differente tenore mediale di ogni epoca) si sono moltiplicati e ibridati i processi attraverso cui la dimensione identitaria e quella relazionale hanno reciprocamente interagito.