A decade(ish) into the ‘mainstreaming’ of dating apps, the popular narratives around app use are shifting.

I’ve researched app safety in the past, and have had a bit to say about the ways tech policy and government policy and legislation does (or doesn’t) support app users.

I haven’t really studied dating apps since 2019, though, and tend to turn down requests for commentary or academic writing on the topic because I feel like I don’t have much to say that hasn’t already been said.

But I was very happy to contribute a chapter on dating apps to the 2nd edition of The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media (currently in production), because editors Larissa Hjorth and Gerard Goggin very kindly allowed me to create a mini-essay on disaffection and nostalgia.

Alas I wasn’t able to include the epigraph from Leo Herrara’s lovely cruising manual:

“A crucial lesson we learn face-to-face is accepting or giving a no with courtesy or empathy. This gets lost in digital cruising, where we can just insult, block or ghost. It’s tempting to romanticize rejection as “nicer” before the apps. It sucks no matter where we are.”[i]

But I did get to cite Raymond Williams (!) and have a good rant about nostalgic journalistic accounts of ‘pre-digital’ dating that invoke universally safe, universally hetero-normative sexual and relational cultures that never existed in reality.

The full edited collection looks fantastic, and I’m looking forward to reading everyone else’s chapters in September. In the meantime, here is teaser from my conclusion:

The rise of mobile dating apps has corresponded with the widespread datafication of everyday life – and a parallel rise in everyday recognition, interrogation, negotiation and pushback against the ubiquity of ‘everyday data intimacies.’[i] Mobile apps promise safer, smoother, more effective relationships and intimacies – but even dating that leads to marriage is not intrinsically safe. It is unsurprising that even successful users have begun to critically interrogate and disconnect from dating app cultures.

[i] Leo Herrea, (analog) CRUISING (San Francisco, CA: Blurb, 2024): 34

[i] Jean Burgess, Kath Albury, Anthony McCosker and Rowan Wilken. Everyday Data Cultures. (Cambridge: Polity, 2022).