Digital tech and intimacies: Relationship’s transformation in the use of dating app Tinder in Chile

Abstract

The paper’s aim is present the results of a research that investigated and problematized the development of interpersonal relationships and the use of digital devices in the context of emergence of dating apps in Chile. Since a virtual ethnography and interviews to users of the social media Tinder, two main points were defined in the analysis of this: the transformation of interpersonal relationships, and self-presentation’s shapes will be described, and how they are established from the practices, languages and behaviors that are articulates since social media itself. In the same way, taking up the theoretical notion of “liquidity” of Bauman (2005), the results, the context and his consequences are analyzed, where the appearance of new subjectivities -profiles on Tinder- accounts to the constitution of self-referred self (Sibilia, 2008).

In effect, this framework visualizes an study’s main assumption: Tinder modifies interpersonal relations and places them under spectacle’s logic, involving mediated relationship with the body, image and sociability in the network.