Gradual Realities: Making Authentically Strange Connections via Tinder in Cape Town

Abstract

Tinder’s streamlined profile set-up and the dating app’s binary swipe system create an illusion of instant realities and neat distinctions. However, engaging with Tinder’s selection process in a meaningful way is much less straightforward than it appears. In Cape Town, a city with a historical legacy of categorical divisions, Tinder serves as a tool to connect with the unfamiliar and the strange, despite the prevalent atmosphere of suspicion. The stories shared with me during my ethnographic research on Tinder in Cape Town reveal that exploring ideals, desires, and degrees of strangeness involves renegotiating past experiences and future expectations. In a cyclical usage, tensions and ambiguities that form part of tindering are negotiated in line with what Katrien Pype has called the ‘technology contract’, changing with every new download. Expectations become blurred and realities gradually formed through these ongoing (re)negotiations and new encounters with relative strangers. In this manner, Tinder becomes a means through which to reflect on one’s own experiences and human interconnections in Cape Town more broadly. Nevertheless, there is a tendency to contrast Tinder experiences with romanticised ideals of authenticity, rendering it tempting to flatten them to simplistic anecdotes and view the app as a metaphor for ‘modern-day dating’.