Does Tinder violate strong triadic closure?
A recent survey of Facebook revealed that it had close to 1.23 billion users, approximately 10 million of which actively use a mobile dating/ hook-up app called tinder. Given, the app has been around for approximately two years, the traction that it has gained with young users is phenomenal and is something worth investigating.
What tinder explores and extends profoundly, is effectively the act of “Facebook stalking”, which in turn is a sanitized version of checking someone out in public. Tinder matches folks based on an idea very similar to Triadic Closure, i.e. the idea that a strong connection between Person 1 and Person 3 in addition to a strong connection between Person 2 and Person 3 would imply some degree of attraction between Person 1 and Person 2 – the strong connection in this case is the idea that person 1 and person 2 are Facebook friends with person 3. This therefore transfers the act of “Facebook stalking” from users to Tinder wherein Tinder serves people with information about mutual matches. Effectively, Tinder is stalking minus any of the effort!
Now, this is a pretty neat extension of the property of closure and has clearly caught on like wildfire given Tinder’s user base, but how does this shift in dating or more appropriately, in hooking up, impact the average user? Turns out, it results in a materialistic form of sanitized dating wherein a person’s utility is determined by their appearance relative to one’s own. Furthermore, the relatively disconnectedness between two people on Tinder results in either being able to back out of a potential hookup at the click of a button. While this may seem expedient at first, recent research has been able to determine severe mental impacts on adolescent girls that get mistreated and/or rejected on the application resulting in situations as adverse as depression and even suicide. In addition, given the nature and scope of how Tinder makes suggestions, a person is less inclined to go out and actually socialize with people so as to create meaningful relationships with them. After all, why should they? Being able to plan out a conversation behind the interface of an application makes communication much more impersonal and averts the potential embarrassment one would incur in the event that a conversation with a potential love interest went sour.
To sum up the above analysis of the social network that Tinder leverages it is imperative to notice how Tinder somewhat foils the idea of triadic closure. This is because despite a strong tie between, say Persons 1 and 3 and Persons 2 and 3, at best, even a weak tie, between Persons 1 and 2 is never a given and relies on factors such as physical appearance, and a potential gain in social and cultural capital for either Person 1 or 2, both of which are implied to have swiped right to form the tie – but as is seen so commonly, this is not always the case!
Sources Read:
– http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/05/11/dating-and-the-impact-of-social-media/
– http://www.myfoxhouston.com/story/25492479/tinder-app-hookups-can-ruin-self-esteem-in-girls