‘I Didn’t Want to Wake up to That’: Rules and etiquette in young people’s use of dating/hook-up apps

This chapter considers same-sex attracted young people’s experiences of using dating/hook-up apps. Study participants suggest that these are unregulated spaces that require users to develop their own rules and codes of conduct. They discussed a range of personal rules that have evolved through their use of dating and hook-up apps, and user etiquette/conduct is discussed in relation to other users, with many accounts of improper conduct that is experienced and expected in these media. Dating/hook-up apps afford much surveillance and discipline (of self and others), through which codes of conduct are continually produced, challenged and revised through navigations of these ‘unregulated’ spaces. Drawing upon Foucault’s discussion of moral codes and ethical subjectivity, this chapter considers how negotiating intimacy within these apps constitutes ethical self-practice