Digital dating apps now mediate a majority of American heterosexual couplings.

Evidence

Location-aware mobile dating apps are now ubiquitous across capitalist economies in the United States and Europe and are increasingly popular in numerous countries outside the Global North—even in contexts with little pre-existing culture of dating, such as China, Bangladesh, and Egypt. Tinder, the industry’s behemoth, was launched in 2012 and has since revolutionized the dating market, making its app a permanent feature in a whole generation’s mobile phones. Recent research has shown that Tinder and a host of competing apps like Bumble, Hinge, and Happn have been rapidly substituting for social networks, family, and friends to become the most significant mediators of modern romantic relations. During 2019, it was reported for the first time that the majority of heterosexual couples in the United States had met through such digital apps, surpassing the human intermediary role of institutions that had traditionally facilitated romantic relations until recently (Rosenfeld et al. 2019). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 218

Categorization

• SHARE: The 2019 finding that apps first surpassed traditional intermediaries could go to anyone working on platform society or family demography.
• XREF: connects to: Digital dating apps displaced human intermediaries as primary matchmakers — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 342