Digital technology and smartphones in particular have transformed many aspects of our society, including how people seek and establish romantic relationships, to the point where we are now dealing with a new erotic capital. Dating web pages are not a new thing. There are several of them and, depending on what the objectives are, the person can choose the one that best suits their profile. It seems that more and more people stop looking for relationships only in physical spaces. And, for some years now, this trend has also been transferred to smartphone applications. A phenomenon that seems to be changing the way of relating and looking for a partner .

In 1995, months after the launch of Match.com – the pioneering partner search portal – its communication director, Gary Kremen, assured that this page would bring to the planet “as much love as Jesus Christ”. Twenty years later, The Meetic Group (which includes Match.com, Meetic and Tinder) has brought, only in Europe, five million couples and one million marriages, as Crespo (2015) explains. Research from the Pew Research Center has shown that few Americans had online dating experience when the company first conducted the activity survey in 2005, but today 15% of American adults report that they have used websites or mobile applications dating.

For this research I have taken the Tinder dating app as a case study. I have observed 200 profiles of the application, being 100 of men and 100 of women, where I have selected 7 male profiles and 7 female profiles, having the age range of 25 to 40 years. The connection was made from the Eixample neighborhood, in Barcelona, ​​on July 5, 2016, with a maximum distance of 76 km between the researcher and the people connected in the application.

I have carried out this research for the final work of the subject “Times, Jobs and Families”, in the Master of Sociology: Social Transformations and Innovation, at the University of Barcelona. To read the full text, click on full article Erotic Capital and understand how technology is revolutionizing seduction.

Ilustraciones: Cristóbal Fortúnez