My attention was drawn by the news that a young Australian man met an even younger New Zealand woman through Tinder. But within hours of that meeting the young woman was dead and the young man charged with her murder.
I am not going to dwell on the details of the case, which is now before the courts.
But it got me thinking. What is this thing called Tinder? Call girls in Dharamshala How does it work? And does it actually result in young people, particularly young women, being placed in dangerous situations?
The first two questions are pretty easy to answer.
To the technically challenged, in other words old farts like me, Tinder is a mobile phone dating application. It’s pitched at the 18-30 demographic and is a location-based app. Tinder let’s you know about people living nearby and then you can anonymously like them or not. If someone you like, happens to like you back then Tinder makes an introduction and let’s you chat within the app. Seems perfectly innocent?
Apparently, it is the hottest thing to happen to dating on the internet and the stats tell, or should that be sell, the story. One billion matches so far, around the world which translates to ten million matches per day… every day. It’s resulted in 300 marriage proposals and five percent of the Australian population of 23 million has a Tinder profile. It’s the brainchild of a couple of southern Californian entrepreneurs but it’s owned by a multi-national start up company.
Tinder is set to be bigger than Ben Hur.
The intriguing genius behind the app is that it’s designed like a game with the tagline – “like real-life, but better. “
It asks users to sign in with their Facebook profile and then make a split second decision on whether they like the physical appearance of someone, or not, by swiping left or right. Once a match is made, the rest is up to you.
The result is an app regularly used by everyone from Miss USA to Olympic gold medallists. It’s in such hot demand that the company recently announced that it would add a verification tick to celebrity profiles. There is no advertising yet but that won’t be far away.
That takes care of the first two questions. But, what about the third question I posed? Does it represent any kind of danger to young people particularly young women? That question I am a bit scared to answer. If i was to give a personal impression of Tinder it could be summed in something I read today: If a guy walks up to a girl standing in a bar and asks point-blank for sex he’ll get his face slapped. Do the same thing on Tinder and she’ll be around in 5. It’s killed chivalry, taken away the need to make any kind of real connection and replaced it with instant, image-based attraction where one click confirms your intentions almost always of the carnal kind.