Abstract

VIEIRA, Jorge  and  SEPULVEDA, Rita. The self-presentation of the Portuguese on Tinder's online dating network. OBS* [online]. 2017, vol.11, n.3, pp.153lpage=185-. ISSN 1646-5954.

Online dating platforms are a present reality, however, investigation regarding the Portuguese users is scarce. Therefore, the investigation conducted in the present article has the exploration of the strategies of mediated self-presentation from the Portuguese users and the process of building individual profiles on the online dating platform Tinder as a main goal. The outline of this research focuses on a mixed methodology for data collection, combining qualitative and quantitative methods, where data is collected via non-participant observations of 200 profiles (resulting in a corpus of 701 photographs and 87 texts), interviews (10), and subsequent content analysis. As main results obtained through data analysis triangulation, it was not only possible to observe singularities but also patterns in the self-presentation practices and identity performance, both in terms of images and textual information. The different strategies involved in the self-presentation demonstrated the reflexivity triggered by the subjects, in a dialect game, with mutual expectations and reading of the mediated collapsed contexts and imaginary audiences. Strong social regularities were found, which demonstrate the situational character of the self-presentation, which shapes the logics of action. The “interaction order” (Goffman, 1983), in a mediated context of public self-presentation, increasingly more collapsed in a web, and where the barriers with the private (backstage) appear to be more blurred, was evidenced.

Keywords : online dating; self-presentation; Tinder; online relationships; impression management; mediation.

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