Mobile lovers: Affordances, spaces, and narrativisation among dating app users in Berlin

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Digital technologies are woven into all parts of everyday life, mediating experiences, practices, encounters and intimacies. My work examines the affordances of platforms and their specific cultural environment of use in relation to users. By affordances, I refer to the way technologies can open up, or constrain, certain social actions and practices - what they allow us to do, and how and why - when we interact. I use ethnographic methods, meaning I spend time with people in their everyday lives, allowing me to determine the social impact of the technologies they utilise. My approach innovates in that it does not seek to create distinctions between online and offline spaces but treats users and their interactions across platforms within their specific cultural environment, thus accounting for a diversity in experience. Looking specifically at dating apps, I investigate how dating rituals and intimacy - a universal centre of human experience and desire - are contributing to the evolution of digital media and communication. I peel back the grand narratives around romance online and moral panics concerning technological innovations, to focus on the personal, to shine a light on the perspective of the user, and thus to account for true diversity in experience.The fellowship will provide funding for a comprehensive development program with multiple strands. Firstly, I will publish my doctoral study as a book, providing a comprehensive and intricate view of the relation between intimacy and technology in Berlin. The book will highlight how technology is no longer the point of delineation between "real" and "virtual", but rather the canvas upon which negotiations of reality and virtuality play out. Through the collection of human narratives that I spent over a year compiling, the book will serve as an overview of how technologies are socialised across cultural environments and how dating apps form a tangible nucleus around which users navigate dating rituals, romantic biographies, and digitally mediated intimacies within city space. The work will make a significant contribution to our understanding of technology, intimacy, and everyday life.Secondly, I will publish an article in a high-impact peer-reviewed journal, outlining the methodological and ethical implications of conducting research on digital platforms such as dating apps and employing chat interviews. The article will highlight the significant potential of digital ethnography in investigating intimacy across different media and spaces in the lives of users, and how and where a researcher can situate themselves ethically within these environments.The fellowship aims to facilitate the growth of a professional network, both within my host university, but also more significantly on a global scale, via my participation in two top-ranking conferences dealing with the study of the online world and the social. The fellowship objectives include fostering connections with scholars across disciplines and nurturing relationships that will allow me to take the next step in my academic career.Finally, to enable my work to reach a broader audience, I will conduct an innovative data visualisation project. I plan to shoot and produce an ethnographic piece of filmmaking in Berlin, where my research was conducted. Utilising my skills as a filmmaker I will incorporate the theoretical and ethnographic findings of my doctoral study and monograph into a visual piece, hoping to paint an immersive portrait of the imagined intimate environment of Berlin, and the way dating apps feed into and are shaped by this culture. The utilisation of videography in data presentation is an important tool to communicate with groups otherwise excluded from academic discourse and ensures that the benefits of research reach their targets when traditional means of publication restrict access.