The aim of this paper is to make a cultural analysis of how young Swedes present themselves and review other’s presentations on the dating application Tinder. I have interviewed seven people between the age of 20 and 34 with experiences from using Tinder and/or other dating applications and websites. Characteristic for my informants is that they have a completed or ongoing higher education, that they call themselves feminists and have leftist political views. These common characteristics have influenced my results, which I have pointed out in my analysis. I have done a thematic analysis, which means that I have highlighted interesting themes brought up by the informants during the interviews. These have been further analyzed from the theoretical concepts of self-presentation, gender and social class. In addition to the interviews, I have conducted a self-reflective analysis of how I present myself and judge other people's profiles on Tinder. Since I am a young university student and consider myself to be a feminist with leftist valuations, it could be expected that I have similar preferences and ways of interpreting other people's Tinder profiles as my informants. As the results show, my informants have more or less deliberately used different strategies to control what kind of impression their profile visitors get of them. Most of the informants express a strong political awareness and believe that it is important that their dating partner have similar values as themselves. They often make judgments of which values other people have based on what kind of clothing style, poses and gestures they present themselves with on Tinder. But even though my informants seem to have very clear criteria for what kind of persons they want to date, some of them also express a curiosity about meeting people with values, styles and tastes that differs from their own. One of my informants had different experiences from Tinder than the others, since she was the only one who used the dating application to meet persons of the same sex. How LGBTQ people experience Tinder is a subject that would be interesting to do some further research on.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-112042 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Liliequist, Christian |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Institutionen för kultur- och medievetenskaper |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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