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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
Kai Dröge ( |
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sociology) Lucerne University of Applied Science and Art, Switzerland and |
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These statements are based on research that I did some years ago together with my colleague Olivier Voirol from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. This study was mainly based on qualitative in-depth interviews with users of dating platforms. Look at http://romanticentrepreneur.net/ for more information (mostly in German, sorry). I see online dating as part of a much broader development in which technical mediation becomes increasingly important in intimate spaces and relationships - think about how people relate to their own body via fitness trackers and apps, how our most private spaces become populated by connected things and digital assistants, how crucial social media is for personal relationships today. One of my main research interests is the economic dimension of these developments – what I would call "intimate digital economies". Two statements about online dating in this direction: Online Dating and the exploitation of emotional labor Online Dating and the exploitation of the romantic economy of love |
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. |
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