You May Not Know This But There's More To Tinder Than Just Casual Dating

Online dating applications, especially that of Tinder has gained enormous popularity over the past few years. Its meteoric rise has cemented its position as the go-to dating app for millions of young and not-so-young users. While it is best known for casual dating and hooking up, it may come as surprise to know that some of Tinder's over 50 million worldwide users are utilizing the platform for their own purposes; from multilevel marketing to political campaigning to promoting local gigs.

Researchers from Concordia University explored this so-called 'off-label use' which is a term borrowed from pharmacology describing when people use a product for something other than what the package says, in a new paper published in the journal The Information Society. Author Stefanie Duguay, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies in Concordia's Faculty of Arts and Science said, "When people encounter a new technology, whether it's a hammer or a computer, they use it in ways that fit their needs and lifestyle. However, once you buy a hammer, it doesn't undergo regular updates or develop new features, apps do. They come with their own marketing, vision for use and sets of features, which they regularly update and often change in response to user activity."

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Duguay looked at dozens of media articles about people using it for purposes other than social, romantic or sexual encounters. Finally, she conducted in-depth interviews with four 'off-label' users. One user's profile was being used to conduct an anti-smoking campaign. Another, an anti-sex trafficking campaign. A third was using the app to market her health products and the last was supporting US Senator Bernie Sanders's Democratic Party presidential nomination run in 2016.

She then compared and contrasted these different approaches to off-label use. "I found that a lot of the time, Tinder's expected use of dating and hooking up, informed or complemented their campaigns. There would be an element of flirtatiousness or they would draw on users' perception of Tinder as a digital context for intimate exchanges," she noted. Many Tinder users who were on the app for its expected uses became upset when they discovered these profiles' actual aims.

According to her, conversations involving Tinder tend to not to be taken very seriously because of the app's association with hookup culture. This dismissive attitude obscures a larger point. "Platforms like this are more like an ecosystem, and when users adopt different purposes than the ones they are designed for, the platforms can change their guidelines or features in ways that greatly affect their users," the authors wrote.

With inputs from IANS

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