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- Title
Online dating em tempos de COVID-19: práticas de uso e dinâmicas comunicacionais em transformação forçada.
- Authors
Sepúlveda, Rita; Crespo, Miguel; Vieira, Jorge
- Abstract
Online dating platforms, which have progressively multiplied and migrated from website to mobile app format and grown in number of users, offer an increasing variety and multiplicity of forms of socialization, which typically unfolds in three stages: profile building, matching with other users and discovery. Even if its users seek more than relationships or sex, the pandemic of COVID-19 and consequent limitations, in particular physical social distance and confinements, have changed the assumptions of its functioning and the way users interact, namely by the impossibility of mutual discovery migrating to face-to-face encounters. In this sense, we sought to investigate three major dimensions of analysis anchored to the national context: 1) how users reacted, in terms of behaviour and consumption habits, to the changes brought about by the pandemic, 2) how platforms adapted and 3) what attention was given by the media to the transformations of online dating. To answer the questions a triangulated analysis of user consumption, communication and platform evolution and media attention was carried out, in a mixed analysis (quantitative and qualitative) carried out using digital methods and tools for extraction, organisation and analysis, and secondary data. The main results point to COVID-19 as an important variable in changes registered in the construction of profiles and consumption habits by users, and of the platforms' services, both in terms of advice and suggestions and new features. The Portuguese media also focused their attention on online dating in adaptive novelties in terms of offers and technologies, and in questioning its use in times of pandemic.
- Subjects
ONLINE dating; COVID-19 pandemic; SOCIAL distancing; MOBILE apps; CONSUMPTION (Economics); SOCIALIZATION
- Publication
Observatorio (OBS*), 2021, Vol 15, p76
- ISSN
1646-5954
- Publication type
Article