Curtir ou não curtir: experimentações a partir do Tinder

Abstract

This work had the objective of analyzing experiences lived through the Tinder, application for mobile devices used for the search of affective-sexual relationship. From an ethnographic study that involved online and offline research environments, conducted primarily with six men and six women seeking the opposite sex in the application, we sought to observe how this inserts in the dynamics of their interpersonal relationships and interferes in their strategies of sociability and experience of the affective / sexual experience. Based on the dynamics of use of the application, we analyzed the course of the contact with the other through this and its interlace with the motivations, expectations, projects and life dynamics of the users. In dialogue with a theoretical instrument that attentive to the agency of the individual in the world of life, it was assumed that, on the one hand, digital platforms such as Tinder are technological resources that configure specific and diverse forms of interaction with each other, inserted in a more flexible and fast dynamic characteristic of contemporaneity. On the other hand, such dynamics are permeated by cultural specificities, personal elaborations and projects related to diverse interests and expectations of the users and their interlocutors, which creates a constant indetermination in the relations formed there. Thus, it was verified that the Tinder figure as a further alternative and an active means in the paths of the search for the other, integrating a movement of search and distance, of negotiation and tension, that entails both expectations of affinity and reciprocity in intersubjective exchanges, tested since the beginning of the contact, as the valorization of the autonomy and the choice as core of the individual project.