Cohort: SOMET 42

Topic of the thesis:  Return to 'Reality'? Dating Apps, Disconnection and Face-to-Face Encounter

Abstract: In recent years, major dating platforms including Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Feeld and Thursday have begun organizing IRL—"in real life"—social events as part of their core offering, a development that has been accelerating rapidly across the industry. Platforms, industry, and media discourse have framed this shift as a response to "dating app fatigue", a diffuse exhaustion with swipe-based mechanics, algorithmic encounter, and the disappointments of digital dating. This project investigates this phenomenon under the terms of "the IRL turn", heterogeneous in its forms and structurally differentiated across platforms, examining the extent to which it constitutes neither a departure from platformization nor a recovery of pre-digital sociability, but a reconfiguration of platform participation through which the desire for unmediated face-to-face encounter is absorbed into and reorganized by the very logics it appears to resist. The project situates the IRL turn at the intersection of the sociology of platformized intimacy and interdisciplinary research on digital disconnection, two bodies of scholarship that have developed largely in parallel and between which sustained dialogue remains limited. Taking Thursday as its primary empirical case and drawing on critical discourse analysis, digital qualitative methods, and comparative ethnographic fieldwork across Paris, Milan, and London, the project contributes a sociological theorization of the IRL turn to digital disconnection scholarship, extends existing accounts of platformized intimacy into the domain of face-to-face encounter, and examines how platform-mediated cultures of dating shape the imaginaries through which participants narrate and evaluate face-to-face interaction.

Research interests: Digital intimacy; Disconnection Studies; Platform Studies; Culture and Consumption; Gender and Sexuality; Science and Technology; Critical Theory.

Graduated from: Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca

Degrees obtained: Bachelor's Degree in Sociology; Master's Degree in Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences

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