Tinder matters: Swiping right to unlock new research fields

This chapter takes the position that people, technology and place are intimately and materially entangled in performances of Tinder, the popular location-aware mobile application (app) designed primarily (but not necessarily) for dating. We draw upon personal experiences of using Tinder (mainly in Australian and European contexts) and the experiences of our research participants who have used Tinder and other location-aware apps (e.g. Backpackr, Grindr and Couch Surfer) while travelling across the world to consider ontological, epistemological and methodological issues of researching the 'digital'. We use new materialist concepts, ideas, theories and approaches to reconsider our approach to researching the use of location-aware social apps during travel, a research focus that stemmed from our own personal observations of witnessing many travellers on Tinder, given our location in the popular travel destination of Sydney, Australia. Our main research methods are the usual suspects: an online qualitative survey and qualitative interviews. But we had essentially 'swiped [ourselves] right' into researching screened and technologically-mediated travel experiences in times of the 'mobile' and the 'digital'. Messy and muddled, complex and consuming, Tinder is completely inseparable from the people who use it. Without us, there is no Tinder. We therefore want to orientate towards the question: what we are becoming with Tinder? And how do our methods need to change in order to capture the intra-activity of human-technology-place relations? When the 'field' is an app on your phone that is in your hand, in your home and every place else you go, the rules of research need to be rewritten.