Spatial dynamics, dating app tourists, and location-porting in the tourist encounter

Abstract

Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Berlin in 2019 and 2020, partly during the COVID-19 lockdown, this article seeks to address the spatial dynamics experienced by young dating app users, aged between 20 and 33, in the context of digital media reconfiguring the tourist encounter. The article highlights how geolocational dating apps seek to create a feeling of proximate romantic possibilities, and hide the global information networks they operate through, a factor brought into relief by the proliferation of dating app tourists on Tinder during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in Berlin. Drawing on ethnographic data incorporating 36 semi-structured interviews and 45 chat interviews across three popular dating apps, Tinder, Bumble, and OkCupid, the study finds that dating apps are operated by users as unwieldy technologies with unreliable distance parameter settings, in the pursuit of primarily local connections.