Love and Technology: An Ethnography of Dating App Users in Berlin (Anthropology of Now)

By: Fabian Broeker

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Synopsis: Love and Technology: An Ethnography of Dating App Users in Berlin explores how dating apps fit into Berlin’s unique dating culture and brand of intimacy, and form a tangible nucleus around which users navigate dating rituals, romantic biographies, and digitally mediated intimacies within city space. Drawing on the field of digital anthropology, this book takes the form of an immersive ethnography, resulting from 13 months of fieldwork with young dating app users, across Tinder, Bumble, and OkCupid, in Berlin. It argues that dating apps offer, or impose, depending on their context of use, a series of affordances. These affordances, and the technological devices they rely upon, exist through the relation between users and their environment, both in terms of physical spaces and cultural frameworks. The book posits that dating apps are woven into spatial practices and self-narrativization, constituting imagined communities for their users, as well as a canvas, alongside the city of Berlin, against which to characterise romantic experiences. Scholars interested in digital anthropology, ethnography, dating, and regional Berlin will find that Love and Technology offers a vibrant springboard for thinking through both theoretical and methodological concerns.