Megan Manzano
ENG 214 [69]
8 April 2014
I Swipe Left to Tinder It was a Sunday night and my friends and I got together at the Cheesecake Factory for our weekly dinner out. There were five of us at the dinner table and we were discussing our lives and new relationships.
Jacob, a twenty-year-old student and my previous neighbor when living in the dorms, says, “I met this great girl on Tinder the other day and we’re going to hang out tomorrow.” Jennie, my roommate, says, “Another Tinder girl? Why can’t you just meet girls in real life?” to which he responds, “It’s not that easy for some people. Plus, this way, I don’t have to deal with girls looking for something serious anymore.” This would be the fourth girl he was going to meet up with from Tinder within the school year. The first three turned into exclusive relationships, but he ended up dumping all of them, because each one ended up being crazy, or so he told us.
When I got home, I began thinking about the app. From what I have been told, Tinder’s main audience was college students. I was not sure why we would need such an app, especially for people our age. I know that it can be difficult meeting new people sometimes, but I figured most college students in my age range, did not want to meet potential partners online. I figured only older people did that when they were lonely. Then I realized, this generation is so obsessed with technology, it makes sense why this app has become so popular. Then I began to wonder, why does the millennial generation rely on technology and social media for dating? Today, dating websites and other Internet meeting sites have become a large success story. With websites like eHarmony, Match.com, Spark Networks, and Christian Mingle on the market, the relatively new smartphone application Tinder, created by Justin Mateen and Sean Rad in 2012, has combined different aspects from all these previous sites and created it into one universal smart phone app. Tinder has become the up and coming success story in the dating game. Presented with a user's photo you either swipe left if you do not like that user and swipe right if you do like the user in the picture (Teitel). I decided to download Tinder myself, to really know the basics of it and to get some of my own personal evidence. Once I downloaded it, I had to create a profile from my Facebook, using four profile pictures and a short 500 or less character count biography. Then I chose the age range, gender preference, and the distance of how far my potential matches could reach. Then I began using the app. The first person to come up was a twenty-five-old guy named Darius, who had a picture of him in the snow with a dog. I clicked on his picture, to see his full profile and in his bio, read, “I have an English accent, I am atheist, I am modest, I am sexy, 5’10.” I laughed. Of course an atheist would write that he is an atheist in his bio. I swiped right, just to see what would happen and we ended up matching. Then he messaged me acknowledging one of my photos and then followed with, “do you want to meet up?” I though to myself, why would anyone actually meet up with someone based off of this? Tinder has given a new meaning to the online profile making process by requiring minimum effort for the future Tinder user, when signing up, and is designed to find partners or sexual hook ups quickly. There are a couple issues with this app. Since Tinder is so simple to join, by just having to sign in through Facebook and upload a profile picture, it completely cuts out the process of having to "sugar coat" a profile that will make one look good and appealing to others. This app provides a location tracker, so that the people you come across are based on where you physically are at the time. In a USA Today article, Sharon Jayson described that Senator Al Franken D-Minn, introduced legislation on Thursday March 27 2014 requiring companies to get permission before collecting location data off their mobile devices and sharing with others. If Congress has come to make a point about the safety of a person’s location, Tinder does not help in the solving the problem of protecting people's location. If anything, it makes the location issues worse due to the fact that the application uses geolocation and personal information from Facebook to match users by proximity. Besides putting people's location in danger, the embedded locator tool within the app makes it extremely common for users to see and get matches with friends, co-workers, and relatives on Tinder (Teitel). That being said Tinder doesn’t do all that much when it comes to matching people based off compatibility, which in the end is what really matters. Plus I would assume most people don’t want to see their cousins, teachers, or their mailman (or mail lady) pop up as a match. Not only could that be awkward and possibly gross, but is just another reason why Tinder is so two sided. For example, after doing a series on interviews with students around campus, a majority of people that have Tinder seem to be very shy and almost hard to approach. And out of the five people I interviewed, they were either using Tinder as a game to basically mess with people or they do not use Tinder because they feel it is not real. "This app is made for people who are too lazy to actually get out and meet people," says Andre Villasenor, student at SFSU.
I couldn’t agree more. Tinder has created a new way of avoiding real human interaction.
Tinder seems to not only encourage laziness in people, when it comes to dating or "hooking-up" but it also encourages people to hide behind another form of social media. Tinder has taken the "behind the screen" image of people to a new level. This application has opened a new door for people to essentially pretend to be someone they are not or act like someone they are not. And by meeting people online you really don't know who exactly that person is until you meet them face to face. Active users of Tinder might argue that the application has attempted to stop "profile fatigue" and Tinder's success heralds the next wave of dating online (Lee). Tinder allows people who don't have any time to date, or do not see the point of dating to find anyone around them to "hook-up" with, saving time and effort. Erica, a twenty-four-year old from Toronto describes Tinder, "It gives people a chance to sift through thousands of people and choose who they want to have sex with" (qtd in Teitel). It appeals almost perfectly to those in the hook-up mentality (many of those in college). For example, in an official interview with my friend, Jacob, who has had much success (in his mind) with the app, says "It has allowed me to meet people in my busy schedule", Mandel reveals his purpose of using Tinder, saying, “I honestly just want to find girls to hook up with now.” He even says, “sometimes I just continuously swipe right, then go through my matches and talk to the girls I would fuck.” He is a prime example of the people Tinder targets as their "audience". The convenience factor of Tinder seems to be one of the main uses of the application. Walking through a college campus where most students are constantly on their phones, it would not be surprising to find out that over 50 percent actively use or have a Tinder account.
After all my research on Tinder, I started to realize why this generation has apps like this to meet people. With social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, it is easy to create a persona that shows people how you want them to view you. People rely on their social media persona’s so much nowadays, that Tinder was probably created based off of this. I noticed, when I used Tinder, that some people share their Instagram accounts in their biography. I am assuming it is to attract people to them and show that they are a real person, but I also think that it is for people to show who they are as a person on social media.
Some people who use social media like to share almost every bit of their dating lives. They like to share when they get into new relationships, how successful that relationship is going, or when they break up. It is all really interesting and nice to a certain extent, but I think that some people take it too far and rely on social media for their happiness. With apps like Tinder, someone can easily boost their self-esteem when they constantly get matched up with people. I think that this is part of the reason why our generation bases relationships and dating off of social media websites and apps. We can create profiles to our liking and make us seem however we want to be seen. When someone comes across our profile and likes what they see online and contact you, it increases our social media ego. It is so easy to hide behind a screen and be someone we are not and build a life around it.

Works Cited
Lee, David. "Tinder 'solves Problem for Humanity'"BBC News. British Broadcasting Corporation, 25 Nov. 2013. Web. 1 Apr. 2015.
Teitel, Emma. "Hey, Didn't I See You on Tinder?"Maclean's3 Feb. 2014: 71.Rodgers
Digital Media. Web. 31 Mar. 2015. <http://www.macleans.ca/authors/emma- teitel/hey-didnt-i-see-you-on-tinder/>.
Jayson, Sharon. "Online and Mobile Dating Face Privacy, Safety Concerns."USA Today. Gannett, 27 Mar. 2014. Web. 1 Apr. 2015.