Value, Values, and Visibility: Public Value Conflation...

"Value, Values, and Visibility: Public Value Conflation in the Mobile Dating Industry"

Presented by Meghan Voll, PhD student in Media Studies, Faculty of Information & Media Studies.

Attend in person: FNB 4130
Attend online: Zoom

Abstract: Today, an app exists for everything, from delivering relevant news headlines, to finding you your most compatible partner. Mobile dating applications are platforms that act as intermediaries, instituting our world and realities, according to certain ways of being. In common to these platforms is their notions of value, such as accessibility, ease of use, and privacy. Widely popular intermediaries like these structure public discourse, conflating private interests with public ones. My research considers “value” and “values” in the mobile dating industry, via applications like Tinder and Hinge. Overviewing Comprehensive Fields Exam Headings, this presentation serves to demonstrate future dissertational research examining how public values like accessibility and privacy merge to support private economic interests. By emphasizing importance on public values but distorting their application to benefit private or corporate interests, confuses and reshapes public understandings of these values. Doing so has certain implications for a democratic society, but also, notions of visibility, where some content is made visible, while others are rendered invisible.

Speaker Bio: Meghan Voll is a third year FIMS Ph.D. student with a research focus on data flows, business models, and practices of the mobile dating industry and applications. She holds a Master’s in Communication Studies from Wilfrid Laurier University, and a Bachelor’s of English from the University of Waterloo.

Presented as part of the Mediations Lecture Series.