I arrived at a weird point the other day, finally admitting to myself that I am addicted to Tinder. I have a tendency to become really focused on things in order to understand them — I prefer to learn through experience — and so Tinder was no different than any other technological thing I’ve written about over the years.
There was a time when I was hopelessly addicted to and obsessed with Facebook, and another time with Instagram. To help with the Facebook fascination/addiction, I wrote about it for a year on the site ReadWrite. I wanted to understand the social elements of Facebook, why people were so upset about it; what was confusing about this way of being with friends on the site; were these people actually your friends; what does it mean to be friends with someone online vs offline; how did Facebook change the ways that we are available to connect with someone?
The media determines the ways we can be in touch. Twitter was less fascinating to me because it was only words and one-liners; that’s more like a stand-up comedian telling jokes, and then waiting for a response or not. It felt safer, easier to disengage with someone who replied with something screwy. Instagram became a fun place to discuss opportunities for visual humor, which I lectured about at Portland State University earlier this year. But Tinder? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know him, her, or it.
All that changed when I came to New York for the summer and befriended another writer named Eve Peyser. Eve and I were introduced through Julia Christensen, an art professor at Oberlin College. Eve and I are both Oberlin alums, and Julia told me that Eve and I had to talk — that we would have so much in common because of our shared interests in performance art, comedy, selfies and the nebulous “post-internet art.” These were the three things I talked and wrote about all the time, and though I wasn’t sure I was “in the market for a new friend” — as if we ever reach a ‘friend capacity’ in our lives?! — I said “OK.”
Julia e-introduced us. Eve and I began a delightful email and text correspondence for the two months leading up to me coming to New York. I was nervous to meet her IRL. But she was exactly the same as she was on email and text; clearly we had this in common, that we best expressed ourselves through words and images. Julia was right: We totally got along and even fell in friend-love, admitting it to each other via text first, and later IRL.
Much of the time spent with Eve in New York included discussing the sexist ways that the media analyzes selfie culture, what it means to be a woman on the internet, our friends and how cool they are, and the overstimulating visual landscape that is Tinder. The last one stuck, hard.
The author and Jerry Saltz. Selfie by Alicia Eler.
Over the course of only one month, Eve and I became Tinder experts. This involved a few things: Understanding what people are communicating about themselves through their photos, being aware of how we feel/what mood we are in when we decided to swipe, and checking in with each other about our potential Tinder dates. (We are also working on an essay about Tinder for the New York publication The New Inquiry, which is more philosophical in nature.) Tinder is real-life. Tinder is a video game. Tinder is a shopping center full of faces. We wanted to see what would happen if we played.
After the game got exciting — as in, we got more matches and started going on dates — I almost couldn’t remember why I joined Tinder in the first place. Was I there to meet the love of my life? Did I want to make some new friends? Was I curious to start weird conversations with people who seemed interesting? Did I even want to meet anyone in person? Was I just there to understand Tinder? Was I looking for sex? Or could it be all of the above? Because there is no real “end point” to the app, and there is no reason really to ever leave it, the Tinder game can go on forever. Just keep swiping until you find what you want, or till you give up and stop playing.
My Tinder swiping varied. On certain days, I would just swipe right to people who looked interesting. On other days, I would swipe to people I thought I wanted to make-out with based on their photos. Other times my swipes indicated a boredom or loneliness, something to do to pass the time and to not put in the effort required of reading a book on the bus. Every match was an adrenaline rush. Who doesn’t want to feel that? But after exhausting the swiping effects, every match started to feel like a dimly lit flame. As my technolust started burning out, I began to feel like a robot, a Tinder avatar.
One day I was headed to Governor’s Island to do a studio visit with Elise Rasmussen. I found myself in Lower Manhattan, a place I don’t usually go. I wondered who was around, so I started swiping to check it out. I happened upon a woman who looked familiar — was she also an art writer? She was cute. I swiped right. We matched. I messaged, and she wrote back. Soon we learned who the other was — she was Corinna Kirsch of Art F City, and I was Alicia Eler of Hyperallergic. I noticed two of my editors in one of her profile pictures — Hrag Vartanian of Hyperallergic, and Jonathan Munar of Art21. She told me she always swiped right to writers she knows from the Internet, and I agreed, saying that I liked that policy. I also only swipe right to people who I think are cute too, and it just so happens that most of those people tend to be writers I know from both the internet and real-life.
Header image: Hrag Vartanian, Jonathan Munar, and Corinna Kirsch. Photo by White Hot Magazine.
Crystal Paradise is a weekly column published every Tuesday by Los Angeles-based writer Alicia Eler that navigates the naturally occurring weirdnesses that spark at the intersection of art, technology and travel.
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