Seeking for Love and Intimacy. Emerging Adults, Mobile Dating Affordances and Dating Culture

The security provided by social norms to individuals has been replaced by uncertainty and endless choices. With the advent of the Internet, the effects and dimensions of all these changes have been intricately combined and intertwined. People have discovered new ways to explore their private lives thanks to technological advancements which have augmented their social reality. The Internet has become a social mediator in a way that initiates, accelerates, defines, and even ends communication. Mobile dating applications have accelerated all these processes by influencing binding elements such as time and space, and have added new dimensions to the experiences, ideas, and perspectives of individuals by creating new patterns. Most, if not all, dates and romantic relationships have infiltrated online practices. All these factors affect the way how emerging adults perceive the world and reflect on their personal preferences. The Mobility Paradigm looks beyond immobile socioeconomic systems and fixed cultural identities to provide a new perspective of past and current cultures, thus looking through this lens will help me discover changes in the way romantic relationships are experienced and established. I aim to address this paradigmatic change and explore how these changes take forms through online tools and how they affect and create new patterns of love and dating.