Meeting Through Social Media – Report from Shabnam Amini on Vimeo.
The prevalence of social apps is helping make meeting new people more efficient, but the question is if it leads to long-term relationship success. More than ever, young adults today are using social apps to meet strangers online and then even taking it a step further and meeting them in person.
Tinder, a smartphone app, is the latest big addition to the online social meet-up world. Tinder is simply a source that helps you meet people based on distance from you, age and gender.
All of these three factors can be adjusted based on personal preference.
“It is a new normal,” said Steve Lee, SMU Adjunct Lecturer in social media and app development. “If you start to think about it, we are all strangers at some point and time. That’s how we meet people, we meet strangers. In controlled situations, we don’t just meet them in the streets.”
Tinder’s growth has been exponential over the last year as young adults look for alternative ways to meet people. In February, the company claimed to have over 750 million swipes per day, up from just 5 million in December. Today, Tinder manages to have more than a billion swipes resulting in some 12 million “matches” each day, according to www.marketwatch.com.
“Meeting someone through a social app is adventurous, it can be fun, but there is also an aspect where you need to be careful with it.” said Elizabeth Lockett, junior and Accounting Major at SMU. “It could go really well or it could be dangerous and go really badly, and the badly part is unfortunately a part of my personal experience.”
Lockett decided to go on a “Tinder double date” with a close female friend recently. She recalls her friend realizing the guy she met on Tinder was not what she expected in real life.
“Apps make it easy for us to connect and communicate,” said Lee. “They also make it easy for predators, but they also make it so we have to be smart. Be smart, be selective and be suspicious.”
Like any successful internet service, Tinder enables people to fulfill some basic evolutionary and social needs.
Tinder enables people to get along in a somewhat sexual and superficial way. It also enables people to get ahead, nourishing our competitive instincts by testing and maximizing our dating potential.
The Tinder app is built around a simple gesture: swiping. By a simple swipe of a potential match’s photo to the left, you tell the app you are not interested. A swipe to the right indicates that you are interested and will show up on that person’s stack of photos. Once two ends of the Tinder users both “swipe right,” Tinder allows the matches to chat with each other internally through the app.
Tinder also enables users to satisfy their intellectual curiosity by finding out not only about other people’s interests and personality, but what they think of ours. If a Tinder user sees a picture, but they are not sure if they are interested in that person yet, they can click on the picture to see an “About” section. This section is open to users to write whatever they would like to describe who they are as a person.
“Their [social apps] success is telling me that we want them,” said Lee. “Why do you think we spend our lives with a phone in our hands?”
But not everyone is okay with meeting total strangers online. Though the idea is slowly being accepted, it does not mean it is totally normal yet.
“I think meeting someone new from within the same community or social group you are in is okay,” said Kaitlyn Hatfield, a sophomore at SMU. “But if it was someone that you didn’t have any other connections with, I think that would be too risky.”
It is hard for young adults to meet new people. Fundamentally, people are tribal. Usually individuals stay in groups that have homogenous thinking. It is natural for a human to look for more people to be with and apps like Tinder give people the opportunity to broaden their horizons, both from a romantic relationship and an intellectual relationship.
“It’s a way to reach out and meet new people; we have thousands of people at this school, but how many do you actually sit there and talk to everyday?” said Lockett. “I met a guy on Tinder who goes to Texas A&M; University and we are great friends now, I never would have met him because he goes to a different school, even though we are pretty similar.”
We may be moving closer to a whole new era where meeting people online is a new normal without anyone thinking twice about it.
“With the younger generations, you look at their functions and behavior, you find very quickly that they can have electronic touch relationships that don’t have any human touch, and they are perfectly fine with that,” said Lee. “In 20 years we are going to see if that matters or not.”
