**1. Introduction**

The app Tinder is a social medium, launched in 2012 by InterActiveCorp and "perfectly suited to a mobile society [1], to a "world of radical individualism, multiple identities and dynamic relationships, unfettered markets and consumer capitalism" [2]. Tinder, whose most features are free, presents prominently pictures in portrait format to fit the typical cell phone's screen. Each user can upload up to 10 photographs. Besides, their username appears, and they can indicate their age, their school or university and the place they live, as well as several hobbies out of a list. Furthermore, a short text with or without emoticons may be added. People from within a particular radius will be presented and based on a double opt-in system, they can match and after this communicate. The app's focus is clearly on photographs, to the extent that several users make fun of it, writing ironical texts such as "finally, I am not reduced to my character".

This article deals with the way people represent themselves through their photographs on Tinder. It is assumable that most people using the app hope for many and/or for suitable "likes", be it to increase their self-esteem or to actually match and meet other users in real life with erotic or romantic intentions. In order to achieve this, people have to take and select suitable photographs referring to both motifs and aesthetics. Therefore, an analysis of photographs posted on Tinder can be a useful approach to learn something about prevailing gender norms and expectations.

#### **1.1 Photography as a means of self-presentation**

When considering self-presentations on Tinder, the following aspects are fundamental: it has long been acknowledged that photography is the "art of the person" and of their identity [3]. Photographs on dating platforms thus can convey not only the way people look, dress and pose, but also which activities and belongings are important to them and further, which aesthetics they pursue. In this context, the halo effect may also be taken into account: it is a cognitive bias in the formation of an impression and defined as a tendency "to assume that once a person possesses some good (or bad) characteristics, their other, unrelated and unknown characteristics are also likely to be consistent, that is, good or bad" [4]. Accordingly, someone who is pretty is also likely to also be seen as "beautiful on the inside" and someone who engages in wild sporting activities is likely to be thought of as adventurous, brave or cool in general. It can be assumed that the users, who are—considering their age group (see below)—probably experienced in social media, do not only more or less consciously orient their judgements to the halo effect, but also their self-presentations: they use attributes and activities as symbols.

In social media contexts in general, standards for images—aesthetics and motifs may quickly establish themselves, as most people strive for positive feedback. On Tinder, however, heterosexual women only see profiles of heterosexual men and vice versa. While it is conceivable to occasionally change the settings of the app, for example out of curiosity, to get the other perspective, overall users probably have fewer insights that reveal anything about standards of self-presentation on Tinder. Accordingly, there should be a more general influence of social desirability, e.g. by looking at other social media.

All in all, these considerations make it likely that the staging and selection of photos on Tinder is based on a conscious or unconscious decision that is not only shaped by one's own goals associated with online dating, but also by assumed social values: "Self-presentations provide rich data for an analysis of gender as it is constituted and produced performatively and discursively, through symbolic, repetitive, and normative expression" [5]. Consequently, the analysis of visual self-representation makes it possible to arrive at statements about a society. So this article aims to find out how heterosexual women and men present themselves, how their presentations differ and what the reasons for these differences might be.

#### **1.2 State of research**

Online dating, or more specifically, Tinder has been analysed from various points of view, e.g. looking at self-esteem [6], impression management [7], the self-representation of migrants and refugees [8], hypermasculinity and misogynism [9], awareness of privacy issues [10], up to the focus on tourism [11]. In our context, gender representation [12, 13] is particularly interesting.

In addition, there is a large body of literature on (visual) representation. A telling starting point can be the mirror experience, in which the identification is first based on an image, as well as on alienation [14] and thus resembles the photographic experience: people see themselves from a new perspective, from the outside. In this context,

#### *The Art of Pleasing DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.109131*

the indexicality of photography has to be considered and with it the connection between a person and their photograph, respectively a picture he or she has taken [3].

An interesting focus "falls on the narrative practices of users' self-representations in social media" [15]. Self-representations often "proceed from a premise of agentic, conscious, and 'authentic' self-authorship. The tacit understanding at work in social media self-representations between viewers and viewed means that members of a networked public generally take a SNS personal profile as an indicator of someone's self-chosen and 'authentic' identity, produced for personal use" [16]. Yet, the term authentic can be questioned—it may primarily be an authentic staging [17] in the sense of a staging which does not hide the fact that it is staged. Furthermore, the presentation may "authentically" tell something about the person, their aspirations, longing, wishes, perceptions, etc. but not necessarily reflect their authentic outer appearance and living conditions. In this context, the anticipated reactions of the audience such as envy, approval, empathy, etc. play an important role. Furthermore, photography nowadays does not only serve as described by Barthes as a chance to a capture a way of being, but to capture a body as it might [18]. Consequently, it may be interesting for people to present various ideas or ideals of the body rather than their authentic looks. Yet, it can be stated that due to their indexicality, people are (still) inclined to believe in photographs: "The epistemically special character of the photographs is revealed by this fact: we are inclined to trust them in a way we are not inclined to trust even the most accurate drawings or paintings" [19]. It also follows from these explicit or implicit truth claims that media representations have the power to "distort people's sense of what there is to see in the social or political domains" [20].

Besides, in recent decades, the body has increasingly become the focus of scientific attention [21]: fluid social boundaries and the disappearance of traditional social classes can explain the increasing emphasis on the body, as it became necessary to differentiate oneself through deliberately and visually, developing an individual style, expressed by an active self-marketing [22]. In this process, media-mediated and reinforced body ideals move into the centre of interest. For Facebook, Gilbert Shang notices: "The dominant motif of photography […] is the presentation of the ideal body/ self. This ideal body follows, but sometimes deconstructs a repertoire of normalized social body etiquettes popularized by mainstream and showbiz cultures" [23].

Gender studies offer yet one more perspective. Feminist scholars have helped to understand "the crucial role that media perform in the reproduction of gender inequality" [24]. Just to give some examples: Viki Mayer analyses the history of telephone girls who "see themselves as uniquely qualified by virtue of their gender" [25] but have difficulty advancing or changing to another position. Sonia Livingston [26] look at gender differences in girls' and boys' experiences of risks in online communication such as exposure to pornography, bullying and sexual messaging. Teresa Lynch [27] found out that women appear much more seldom in video games playing central roles and that sexualized secondary female characters mostly remain passive. In our context, online misogyny [28] is interesting to look at. This mainly refers to sexual harassment and trolling and was attributed to the "crisis of masculinity", as women and girls occupied traditionally male-dominated positions in education and job life, which has led men looking for new ways to express strength ant domination. Consequently, it is useful to also look at research on masculinity. Social media are said to carry "notorious reputation for being home to hypersexual and toxic masculine expressions" [29]. So the question here is to what extent the research can confirm this assumption.

However, it has to be kept in mind that in our case, it is not about how men and women are represented, but how they represent themselves. We can assume a "male gaze" [30] referring to the photographs of women, that the women themselves take into account when staging or selecting the pictures, but at the same time, men on Tinder may consider just the opposite—the way women would look at them. These considerations already show that social desirability plays an important role. Thus, they also indicate that self-representation on Tinder can tell something about social values.
