Since the invention of the internet 30 years ago,
network technology has connected us in increasingly intimate ways.
Today, the world is literally at our fingertips through our phones.
'We do see the phone as bit of an extension of ourselves.
This is going to be a really enduring technology to have a small screen with you at all times.'
'The immediacy of connection has radically impacted life
in the 21st century.
Especially when is comes to
Sex and Love.
'In the last 5 years a
good third of relationships
start from online dating
if not more.'
'There's a totally new generation of people who are just coming into dating now
and they do not give a shit about those rules.'
It's estimated that by 2040,
70% of all couples will have met online.
And today
there are over 30 million people on dating apps,
all searching for love and orgasms
one swipe at a time.
'Remember these sites are a business,
these apps are in the money making business.
Of course they're going to try to make a whole ton of cash off of this,
because what's monetized
is visibility.'
Dating apps have changed the way we meet,
the way we date,
and the way we fuck.
'The biggest online dating sites have only been around for several years.
We dont really know in the long term
what's going to happen.'
Social change and technological innovation are always met with resistance.
From the invention of the birth control pill,
to the internet porn boom,
to dating apps.
It's clear when sex and tech mix,
the result is social turmoil.
Critics claim dating apps, and the rise of the hookup culture for catalyzing the dealing apocalypse and the death of
courtship itself. With all this in mind I decided to try out a few dating apps myself and meet their inventors.
To determine whether the mobile love industry has truly sparked a dating Armageddon or
whether this is a dating revolution.
We're in LA right now, we're headed towards the beach to meet Julie Spira.
She's a cyber dating expert and she runs something called mobile dating boot camp;
where she basically beats people's dating profiles into shape.
She saves people from themselves basically. I hope she can help me, you know swipe with success.
Her book talks about the fact that she was one of the really early users of internet dating. So like in 1994, she was on early dating sites before people even
really knew what the internet was. So she's been doing this for like 20 years.
'Online dating actually goes way back to lonely hearts ads, back in the 1700s
And that's when people originally started posting these very short profiles and
people would say things like I prefer a shapely ankle or I'm worth this much
money, and this one's the genesis of a person self articulating in a
short way what they thought they could offer to somebody else. What should I
select about my identity that I want other people to know first and know as
a signal of how attractive I could be to them. 'You want to help me with my
profile because I think i need help.' 'OMG i would love to help you with your profile.' 'Let me show you my tinder profile, i've only been on tinder for a few weeks....
'Wow your first profile is very sexy, so what are you looking for?' 'Everyone's always
looking to meet someone they really like right? But I'm ok with not liking
someone that much if they're really hot.' 'Ok so I'm a writer, 5 foot 9....
So basically you're not saying very much. So someone's gonna love that photo, and then they've got to basically look at your additional shots.
Another sofa shot, hmm...if I'm a guy I'm gonna think this girl is hot in bed.
And the party shot with the friends....okay that one i think needs to go.
The photobooth shot, you got that little kissy thing, so guys are gonna want to pucker up and kiss you alright.
So creating a profile's a really modern invention, it's not something natural for people.
The creation of a profile actually affects the way people see themselves.
' So find a photo from here that you like.' 'This is a keychain that a friend got for me, it's says slut on it'.
'That cannot be your primary tinder profile shot, slutever, slut, you're saying on your.....
I know its your brand and you say you're being authentic, and
genuine and you look very sultry like you look like you just have sex or
you're just getting ready to have sex, but at the end of the day you get these
big breasts and it says slutever and we know that's your brand but guys don't know
that. They're gonna be swiping right, swiping right, here's a girl calling herself a slut.
Yeah yeah, I'm gonna get, I'm gonna get lucky tonight. 'Right and then.....OK I'm just
and that's bad, that's bad. Unless it's what you want. 'I guess my attitudes towards sex
and dating are pretty evident. I mean I go by the moniker slutever and I write a
progressive sex blog.' 'I think you should try and see if you can find something
from one of these because ...um red, colour of blood, passion romance...if we could crop the guys out of it,
I happen to like that picture.
Yes it's a match!' 'So here's the deal, now that you have a match on him rather than
keep playing, be proactive! Click send message. 'Ok what should i say?' My tinder match Jamie wants to meet up that evening.
'So you're going to be filming your date tonight, so your date knows that?'
Now that my profile has been given a makeover by a cyber dating professional, i was ready for my first date via tinder.
So i invited him out for a few drinks in Venice.
One of the basic things we know about relationships is that people like to be
compatible. So now different apps look for different kinds of similarity. They drive
you towards what they think is a specifically happy relationship with
their vision of compatibility. 'Hey nice to meet you'. 'Nice to meet you too'. 'What's up?' 'This sounded fun so...different'
'Yeah well, do you go on tinder dates a lot?' 'Yeah'. 'Do you think tinder's destroying
romance?' 'Yeah 100%. You know there'll be somebody that's on there that I wanna talk to,
and we have great conversation and then 5, 10 other girls come on there and all the sudden I start
talking to them randomly, then I forget that the person's on there. When you get a lot of the basics
out of the way before you even meet up, when you guys meet up it's like you already have
this kind of establish connection but you haven't had the physical connection
of being around each other that's developed so like the little, small nuances of, you know
just the body language and stuff like that which is very important which you, you end up
missing out on by interacting complete throught an application.' 'Could just
texting someone for a few hours be the same as running into someone at a bar, getting
along with them really well and they just leaving with your friends and just being like I'm
disconnection you know I mean, just a fleeting moment in the world. 'I think the
reason why it's killing a little bit because it's so much easier whereas
meeting somebody at a bar, meeting somebody at a coffee shop or restaurant or
anywhere it's a little more, there's more tension, you know what i mean, because its a face-to-face
interaction and the
opportunity for rejections there versus swiping right on somebody or
swiping you know, if you both swipe right then there's the connections are made
for you there's not that awkwardness is already built up.' 'Now tInders just much
more about user choice and about reciprocity. What tinder does is say you know
you cannot contact me unless I also agree to be interested in you. 'I went to this dating coach, and she told me that
if it was successful that we should make a plan of when we're gonna hangout again.
'Ok, well we can go like somewhere else'. 'Yeah we could do that'. After my date, I was looking forward to meeting
with the tinder gods, who facilitated all this to begin with.
We're here in LA, at Tinder, aka the Mecca of dating apps. And we're going to go upstairs and talk to the creator, whether his app is a response to the dating apocalypse or back to the dating revolution.
Technology particularly and start thinking more about how data about us is
created and how it's shuffled around. I think tinder actually cracked that nut.
Tinder amasses volumes of data, with over 26 million matches per day, it's one of
the most use social applications in the world. But what do all these data even do? Is it just another way to
make money or have they actually discovered an algorithm for love? Hoping to learn what
Tinder does with these figures, i sat down with Dan Gould the VP of
technology at Tinder. 'What about the data you collect? Um is there anything that's
really surprised you? Or patterns that you thought were strange?' 'If you look at
straight users, you can look at men swiping on women, and it turns out that
you plot the frequency they swipe right person to person and it looks exactly
like a bell curve. Meaning men are incredibly simple, they're predictable you
can understand the behavior.' 'We knew that'. 'Then you do you do the exact same
plot and you do that for women swiping on men and it turns out that it doesn't
look at all like a bell curve, it's a very skewed plot. It's much harder to
predict
which men, women will Swipe on than which women, men will swipe on. What you have is
the choice, the chance to meet people who are really right for you.
Who you could build a much better life with and I think that's gonna change all of
society that people start to find the right people for that. We've seen
that actually, well years ago ago that divorce rate went way up it's actually started to now
decline and trail off....and I wonder if a lot of that's to do with things like Tinder.
'What surprised me the most about mobile dating was what became monetized.
what's monetized is visibility so in a way, we're kind of like advertisers for each other now.
Sean Rad is the co-founder, president and returning CEO of Tinder
and admittedly uses the app himself.
Dating apps' a multi-billion dollar industry, what do you think about the commercialization of love?
Do you ever get any weird
feelings about that? I think so much, so many industries are about the
commercialization of love. When you're single what you are looking for is that
connection. Everything you do, your career ,where you go out, everything,
there's this undertone of wanting to find somebody to connect with, so many
industries indirectly or touching on that need and that desire to connect.
Umm Tinder's directly touching on it. 'Are we experiencing a sexual revolution now? Like is thisthe sixties all over again in
a different digital way?' 'When you look at a longer-term horizon, you know people of
all society changes, every time there is a change and there's a counter-culture,
there's an enemy. we got so many people that's sort of embraced Tinder and love
Tinder
and see it at a forefront of a very positive change and then we have people
who are afraid of change.' 'In the past you've talked about how you feel like
eventually the phone will just be an extension of your body',
'yeah, yeah I think the phone or technology will enhance how we
interact with the real world. Tinder already does that, so I think there's you know....we're pulling in
information from the people around you and we're giving you an interface to
interact that information that you can't get without technology and I think you'll
see that is a theme over the coming years and decades I think there will be
a convergence between like how we interface with life and technology sort of having
the place in what we do'.
I came out, you know 17 odd years ago and I can tell you the rapid evolution of technologies
on the whole, I think a real boon for gay people. So in a way dating apps are part
of this shift towards a normalization of gay people and that normalization makes
people feel validated, makes them feel inclusive and it makes them feel that
they're not an other and yeah that's a really positive development. I mean
we've come a long way in the last twenty years, and the internet I'm sure has had a
huge part to play in that.
We're here in San Francisco at the office of HER which is one of the biggest dating
apps for LGBTQ women in the world. We're gonna go talk to the creator about
hooking up and finding love through your phone. 'Do you think that for gay people outside
of cities where there's a really accepted gay community that you know getting
apps and using your phone's to meet people makes dating safer?
'We have countless stories of users, who lives in like the middle of nowhere in america and when
they were questioning their sexuality they used to have to like take months or
years to build up the confidence to book a motel for the night, to go stay in the
city, to go to a gay night for the first time ever by themselves to see if
they might actually be able to meet someone. It's awful that it takes that long
just to be able to try and understand something about yourself and i think that's the
biggest advantage that you can get from apps, is that you can talk to someone immediately
and you start building, understanding the relationship so much faster. There also an
argument that safety comes in numbers, and the more people you meet, the more like safer you feel on these things.
A lot of people now are successfully able to find a match through
online dating in a way that you put almost never do offline. Especially for
a lot of minority groups, this ability to search for certain kinds of
people online it's an absolute boon to their relationship.
After spending a day swiping on HER, I finally match with Jolene, a party promoter
who took me to a queer bar in the Castro. 'Can you find love through a dating app?' 'Absolutely, if you want it you can have it.'
'Evolution is definitely moving forward.'
'And people are going on real dates through the app.'
'They are. What do you mean by real dates?'
'What's a real date?' 'That's a good question'. 'Is this not a date right now?' 'I think we're on a date'.
'Yeah i think so'. There's so much moralistic in the media now, like traditional dating,
like should we all just get drunk and do a shots and meet at a bar, like that's somehow better...ten years from now the
definition of what traditional dating as well can be completely different.
This is like the sexual revolution all over again.
Absolutely, because ultimately going on these apps,
all the people that download the apps, want to meet somebody.
Despite Tinders' domination of the dating app market and the growing options and
LGBTQ dating apps, there's a new app that's rapidly growing in popularity.
Born in France, Happn is the hopeless romantic of dating apps. Using location tracking to
match users with people they cross paths with throughout their day. Happn has
quickly expanded to three million users around the world. Here we are at the most romantic place on earth, the Eiffel tower.
I got a connection.
There's something about Happen that feels more authentic, you know the idea that maybe you pass someone on the way to work every
single day and never notice each other because you're starring at your phones or whatever, so it says
for example like you and Pierre crossed paths at 2 p.m. and if you both like each other
then you can talk. It's very romantic, its sort of fitting that it started here in Paris. Part of the reason that dating apps
work is because they use location. ? has this phrase that the
internet reconfigures accessibility, who you can access and how you can access them.
Basic human needs especially needs for companionship, needs to be validated,
needs to be loved, these are really enduring needs that technology has not
changed yet. 'Waiting around for love'. Mobile apps don't change basic human needs, a gadget in
your pocket is not going to change that basic human need, we're wired for that.
We're here at the Happn HQ and we're about to go in and talk to Didier one of the founders of the app.
It launched about a year ago and it's still expanding. And its expanding really fast.
There's over six million users and are getting an additional million users every month so
it's one of the fastest expanding dating apps, and i wanna know why he thinks that is.
Decided to start Happn around two years ago and in fact the main concern for us was that
the dating websites or apps were too virtual and we wanted to bring back the
real world into the dating space, will be to the magic of life when you walk in
the street and suddenly you meet someone and there is something which is
happening. Things can happen everywhere, it's more and more difficult for the
people to meet each other in big cities so happen when you see your timeline this
is the story of your life through the people you have encountered and also you
will keep the memory of all the people you have encounter. Every time you cross
paths with someone, you can have a story which is not necessarily a love or
sex story, ok it's just meeting the other ones. 'It sort of makes sense that you
know the most poetic of dating app started in Paris don't think you think?'
Ah of course French are the best lovers in the world.
Happn was able to build an app on the notion of classic French Romance, so I was
feeling hopeful in the city of lights. It totally Happn for me. I crossed paths with an entrepreneur named Pierre.
He asked me to meet at a posh restaurant in the six arrondissement, it was dimly lit, romantic and
honestly a bit creepy. People always want that first moment to be a magical moment
of some sort and clicking on someone's thumbnail or swiping right
doesn't inspire a lot of romance. 'I'm nervous, i usually take a shot before I go on dates
but I forgot. I don't know, i don't know what to expect, i mean that's the thing about meeting someone on an app. I have high hopes.
'Do you think that meeting through an app is like less authentic or less good than
meeting in real life?'
But you think that because you have access to so many girls
or guys through the apps, you think makes people less likely to actually
settle down and be in a relationship?
Do you usually sleep with girls on the first date?
But why for the girl? Why is it important for a girl not to sleep on the first date? Rather than the guy?
yeah
'So what your like opening line?
So you're lying?
That's not good, that's bad. The idea of dating apps is that it's leveling the playing field.
And you don't have to be manipulative with people, you can say ....
'That's a good point'.
You know people say that dating apps cause sex addiction and I don't think that's true....
'Yeah that's true oh like the first time it's so exciting. Do you think that the sex is any
different that you have through apps than it is with someone you meet in real life?
But there's an interesting take away from dating apps because
you have there's more competition now you have to be better at everything.
Maybe it's like everyone's game is being upped
Dinner was good, it was fine, I thought he was nice and we had a good conversation but he had a little bit of
a sexual double standard which is not something that I find attractive at all but I
did enjoy the meal.
The sexual double standard is not about sexual practices, it's about social practices.
It's about how people communicate their sexual lives to others. You can be very
sexually active and have most of your personal network not know it all.
Calling a woman a slut is a way of shaming her within a social group that
social group is no longer relevant to dating, it's just saying you guys aren't
relevant anymore.
Your judgment of me is not relevant anymore.
The most controversial and perhaps the most progressive of all dating apps is based in London.
'Do you think our generation's doomed because we all fucking through dating apps?' 'Yeah i think its a bad thing to be honest.'
So do you use dating apps? 'Yeah, i use Tinder, i just recently joined there.
Have you ever met anyone on it? Umm...i've never actually gone on a Tinder date, no. You need to spend more time on the app. Yeah, i clearly need to get swiping.
What's your stance on dating apps?
What are your weird Tinder experiences?
It wasn't a catfish but it's almost like a catfish, her face was the same but she was really really short.
So i'm here in London, we're about to go meet Deemo,
the creator of 3rndr, which has been dubbed as the notorious threesome app and
has got lot of sensational press. Apparently he's somewhat of a character, he's only 25
years old , he doesn't work out of an office he works out of a park, he seem sort of like a running gun all
over the place crazy so this should be really interesting. 'So why did you start 3rndr?'
'My girlfriend had this feeling for a girl and she wasn't feeling comfortable
she even wrote me a letter, how she felt about it. I was like there's nothing wrong with it, you should not be worried about this stuff.
So I decided to make this thing to sort of proof that there is absolutely
nothing wrong with the way she feels about people. 'Sounds like you created 3rndr as a
love letter to your girlfriend to prove to her that there's
nothing wrong with being bisexual'. 'Yeah yeah yeah'.
I said there is that there must be a place where people can talk open about
stuff without being called weirdos, even if they're weird, weird should not be a bad word.
We don't target girls, we don't target men, it's just open and whoever goes there goes there.
I believe there should be a space where these people should thrive.
So one of the things that we found in online dating and that's the shift towards networked
individualism, we express ourselves as single individuals and connect to single
other individuals. You can search for all sorts of very specific kinds of people,
someone might be interested in people that are mainly tall or short, someone that is
very extroverted or into a specific kind of music. You just might not find that
sort of person in your social network but you may be able to search for them
and use them as a category instead. 'I wanna set up a date for 3rndr
tonight if possible, umm can you help me?