In this online talk, Dr Fabian Broeker draw from his ethnographic research with dating app users in Berlin, conducted across 13 months anchored within physical city space and the various digital platforms utilised by research participants. Taking a relational approach to users and technology, He aimed to highlight how dating apps form a tool in the experiential narrativisation of users’ romantic lives in the city. His work sees dating apps as constituting one point of communication in a polymedia framework of intimate digital devices and platforms, operating as geolocational media within the city. From this perspective he trace how dating apps are integrated into dating practices and rituals that span city space and a culture of storytelling inherent to the way intimacy is experienced by users.
Dr Fabian Broeker is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Fabian’s research focuses on technology and everyday life, particularly social media and dating apps, and how these interplay with questions of intimacy and identity. He is interested in urban environments and digital media practices and the study of these through ethnographic methodologies. Fabian holds a PhD from King’s College London, where he conducted an ethnographic study into young dating app users in Berlin, investigating the way dating rituals are narrativized and intimacies enacted across platform. He is currently writing a monograph based on his PhD fieldwork, “Love and Technology”, to be published with Routledge.
ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow , Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics
Fabian’s research focuses on technology and everyday life, particularly social media and dating apps, and how these interplay with questions of intimacy and identity.