About The Red and Black (Athens, Ga.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 6, 2014)
32 AMPERSAND | FEB/MAR 2014 U PHOTO BY EMILY SCHOONE BY DANIEL FUNKE it 1- Wake up Athens; dating has changed since the days of knights, chivalry, courtship and dowries. Nowadays, in the fast-paced chaos of modern life, young people use their smartphones for literally everything. Anyone with a semi-firm grasp on current events understands that. How ever, the utility of Apple’s iPhone goes beyond just listening to Beyonces new album or mind lessly checking Twitter. Dating apps, such as Grindr, Tinder or Lulu, are becoming increasingly popular amongst the 18-24 year-old age group. Think of a mobile, labor-unintensive Match.com; users create on- line profiles with information such as relation ship status, physical characteristics and goals in hopes of meeting people for dates or hook- ups. This means that iPhone users can actually schedule a hookup for the night and pay for their Starbucks with the same device at the same time. The most well-known dating app is Grindr. A location-based iPhone app that displays local singles in a kind of profile picture mosaic layout, Grindr is used by nearly 4.5 million gay men worldwide. Users can browse the profiles of gays in their area, view their pictures and chat with them. As the name not-so-subtly suggests, the app creates significant controversy among its users. “It takes well-rounded individuals and funnels down their persona into a sexualized image that places more emphasis on one’s physical ap pearance and less on one’s personal and emo tional traits,” says Alex Merritt, a freshman en vironmental economics major from Alpharetta. “Grindr takes a large group of people and pits them against each other while connecting them.” An anonymous sophomore said that the util ity of Grindr is largely up to the user. “I think that with Grindr or any app like that, you get out of it what you put into it. If your intention is to solely hook up then that’s fine, and you’ll get that out of it,” the source says. “But I think Grindr also enables people who are looking for other gay guys to make friendships or quality relationships with.” Tinder can be viewed as the heterosexual counterpart to Grindr. In the app, users connect to Facebook to find people in their area that are similar to their friends. Then, they systematically scroll through possible matches, choosing with whom they want to chat. Tinder is often trivialized as merely just anoth er way for desperate college students to hook up. “In college, I don’t think people take Tinder seriously. Sure, some people may find success, but I think it leads to more hookups than rela tionships,” says Agne Stoskute, a freshman jour nalism major from Chicago, Ill. However, some find Tinder not only easy and convenient, but essential. “I am a musician which means I travel a lot. I’m also bored and lonely in cities we have a lay- over in,” said Frank Keith IV, a senior journalism and music business major from Atlanta. “Tinder has allowed me to meet some very memorable strangers when I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.” Perhaps the creepiest app out there is Lulu. Originally introduced to sororities, Lulu allows women to anonymously write reviews and make comments about men that they have had roman tic experience with by pulling information from Facebook profiles. “When you Google a guy, you don’t want to know if he voted Republican or what he wrote a paper about in college,” founder Alexandra Chong told The New York Times. “You want to know if mothers like him. Does he have good manners? Is he sweet?” Love them or hate them, dating apps are growing in popularity. A study by the Pew Re search Center found that seven percent of cell phone users reported they had used a dating ap plication. Before Grindr’s creation in 2009, that number was virtually zero. And with the growing number of cell phone users, dating and hooking up via mobile apps has seemingly unbridled po tential for lonely people in a digital age.
