| Description | The politics of matching, messaging, and making the first move in online dating with Riki Thompson, UW Tacoma
As digital technologies, smart phones, and social media have become embedded in everyday life, the search for love and lust has also become increasingly digitally mediated with online dating as one of the most common and fastest growing means for people to meet. In the U.S. alone, approximately 32 million users accessed online dating services in 2020 with the number is expected to reach 35 million by 2024. Globally, 31% of single internet users date online according to a 2020 study. Prior to the internet, people searched for partners in a variety of ways, including through social networks, matchmakers, dating services, and personal ads. Many of these techniques have been adapted and mobilized through the affordances of online dating platforms and apps that operate as a form of social media, connecting people through dating profiles, matching algorithms, and messaging features. In the world of online dating, Bumble has become known as the feminist app that promises to change the rules of dating by empowering women to send the opening message to men they match with. Drawing on interviews with over 100 online daters, this talk will discuss the politics of making the first move in relation to gender and sexuality along with the limits of technological interventions to solve social problems.
Dr. Riki Thompson is an Associate Professor of Writing Studies & Digital Rhetoric in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences. Her scholarship examines intersections of language, technology, identity, and interpersonal connectivity with a focus on how people negotiate digital spaces to connect with (and exclude) others. Dr. Thompson’s research about online dating has been featured in The Conversation and Salon, and interviews about pandemic dating can be found on Vox, the Learning More podcast, and Boise State Public Radio. She is currently working on a book about online dating which explores how people represent self, evaluate others, and communicate in digital dating spaces.
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