Mobile dating app Tinder fanned the flames of outrage surrounding Vanity Fair's apocalyptic "trend piece" on online dating Tuesday night, unleashing a string of tweets criticizing writer Nancy Jo Sales for supposedly biased reporting and incorrect facts. While the rant may have erred toward the self-important — Tinder did, after all, use the tweetstorm to claim that the app is "changing the world" and helping those living under isolated regimes in North Korea and China meet new people — it shouldn't be written off completely, says Jesse Singal at New York.
Sales' article relied heavily on vivid anecdotes to incite moral panic, Singal says, and she brushed aside some of the studies that didn't fit in line with her hypothesis that apps like Tinder are destroying ideas of traditional courtship and marriage and replacing them with meaningless, no-strings-attached flings.
"The problem is that while Sales certainly spins a good yarn, it doesn't really add up to evidence that something revolutionary is afoot," Singal writes. "It's one thing to write an ethnographic piece about Tinder-maters in their natural habitat; it's another to extrapolate this to make sweeping claims about the epochal ways dating and sex are changing." Singal concludes:
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Taking a moral-panic approach to something like mobile online dating makes for a good story, but it also drowns out the opportunity for a richer conversation, and hardens certain false notions about millennial culture. Online dating clearly is changing how many people meet other people and date and have sex. But it's probably changing their behavior in all sorts of different, sometimes conflicting ways. In some cases, it's probably helping people find husbands and wives sooner, leading them to have fewer sex partners. In others, it probably does lead to some decision paralysis and frustration with dating. In many cases, it probably just reinforces the user's pre-existing preferences — pro- or anti-promiscuity, pro– or anti–finding someone to settle down with.But you wouldn't be able to fit "apocalypse" into that headline. [New York]
Read Singal's full analysis at New York.
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