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- Workshop website: https://wiki.univie.ac.at/x/mEe0Bw
- Registration, attendance: https://youthmedialife2021.univie.ac.at/registration/
- Conference programme: https://youthmedialife2021.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/k_youthmedialife2021/yml2021-programme.pdf
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Position Statements
Moritz Meister & Thomas Slunecko (cultural psychology) Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Austria |
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In our view, dating apps provide a post-traditional mediatized solution to the initiation, organization and management of (usually) two persons’ mutual awareness and coupling. Thereby, they also strongly affect individual subjectivation processes as well as social practices. That is because they require users to actively create individualized content while requiring a potentially large user community in order to provide ‘choice’ and frequent interactive use. Multi-level societal changes through dating apps might be much stronger routed in a change of self-relatedness than, for instance, in an enhancement of sexual opportunities. As with Self-Tracking apps these changes seem to come about through a ‘metricalization’ of the own body – and in some cases also users’ minds, e.g., with personality profiles based on questionnaire data and on-site activities in OkCupid. As long as digitally processing personal pictures and metrics is set in the context of a competitive ‘dating-market’, we suspect an economization of users’ selves contrary to the principles of digital humanism The overall objective of our method is to analyze apps and platforms as ‘micro-dispositifs’. Thereby, we aim to identify the manifest as well as implicit knowledge they entail and how this knowledge is connected with specific modes of subjectivation. One part is participating in and systematically stepping through an app’s user interface (walkthrough method; Light et al. 2018), whereby a data basis of screenshots and field notes is created so that the constituent parts of the digital artifact’s design (structure, functions, icons, animations, text, etc.) and the non-linguistically performed practices with them can be transcribed into linguistic expression and explicitly reconstructed. One the other hand, those user interface-centered interpretations can be compared with the social orientations that manifest themselves in group discussion or narrative interviews with developers and users on an app. For analyzing the least two, reconstructive and praxeological methodology (like the documentary method) are well-proven. Together with the user interface walkthrough, this can constitute a productive interdisciplinary approach. |
Albert Rafetseder (computer science / communication networks) Cooperative Systems Research Group, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna, Austria |
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Information and communication technology permeates all areas of our lives, including private and intimate ones such as partnership and sexuality. While operating mostly invisibly, it forms the very substrate that facilitates many of today’s services, and from this position of power it mediates and surveys active, human-initiated as well as automated, operational communication. Online Dating services are no exception in the way that they follow market dynamics and technological or artistic trends in app design. Their other aspects are rather novel, e.g. the way they introduce dynamics into the social networks they form, how they fuel and foster specific patterns in human communication, or their monetary and non-monetary economical ramifications from engagement and pay-for-use to presenting and rating oneself and others. I view Online Dating as a prototypical representative service for a discussion about the opportunities and limitations of technology design, from the intimate use and real-life outcomes to the human-facing aspects of, e.g., apps and websites, and down into the infrastructure. My hope is for better-educated developers to understand the societal consequences of their professional performance better, create more transparent services, and enable users to take better-informed decisions when using technology. In addition, I consider computer science as a scientific discipline to be overdue for sincere self-reflection about the ever-simplifying, problem-solving focused mindset it represents and continues to teach. For the interdisciplinary workshop, I would like to reflect my insights into technical conditions and self-conceptions that shape technological artefacts, and build bridges to other scientific disciplines to foster the mutual understanding of viewpoints. This is as much a desire for an exchange about Online Dating as a particularly representative case, as well as a step towards posing the bigger questions of scientists’ and engineers’ roles and responsibilities in society, their goals, ambitions, and professional decency, etc. which are too often postponed in my field. |