ABSTRACT
By enquiring how geolocational dating is algorithmically steered and negotiated by users, this chapter explores the variable ways in which dating apps support a new kind of mobile sociality. With an accent on dating app platform infrastructures and focusing on women and LGBTQ+ users, it examines the algorithmic and discursive precepts that frame dating app practices to consider whether these platforms empower new mobility practices. The intersecting technical and discursive conventions of mobile dating are analysed by drawing on Benjamin’s metaphor of the ‘flaneur’ as a heuristic tool. This enables an assessment of the role played by dating app imagery, algorithmic and interface codes in capturing a late modern fascination with voyeurism, anonymity, speed and immediacy. The term ‘geo-social flaneur’ is developed to foreground the dynamic complexities and challenges involved in the observer-participant dialectic generated by platforms’ geolocational logic. This approach supports an exploration of the tensions involved in dating app users’ navigation of a digitally layered geographical space and geographically layered digital space. The chapter explains that this hybridised space offers a new kind of geo-enabled mobile sociality. By summoning women and sexual minorities to engage as geosocial flaneurs, dating apps present themselves as agents of gendered and sexual transformation. However, this enquiry draws attention to the techno-social constraints imposed on this geo-enabled mobile sociality, constraints that curb fluid identities and curtail new opportunities to reclassify heteronormative spaces as queer digital-physical hybridised spaces.
