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ARTWORK: Rose Dixon-Campbell
tinder is a tool of misery BY ROSE DIXON-CAMPBELL
When I imagine the apps on my phone as tangible real-life phenomena, dating apps always appear in my mind’s eye as the digital Wild West. I get more dick pics on Instagram (please stop) and more spammers and scammers in my emails and yet dating apps, specifically Tinder, seem like the final frontier for civility and etiquette. There is something animalistic and mindless about the endless swiping. After some time on that app, it comes to feel less like a social platform where you can interact with other humans in a very specific context, and more like a game wherein the pictures you see are merely avatars to be rated with either a × or a . It was this mechanic which made Tinder so popular in the first place. You only know when someone likes you, not when they don’t. On Tinder you do not have to directly live through rejection as you would in real life, nor do you have to reject people to their faces and deal with their disappointment thereafter. The messiness of face to face interaction, the adrenaline, the awkwardness, and the giddy flirtation has all been sanitised in this swiping mechanic.
