You can’t use this app for that: Exploring off-label use through an investigation of Tinder

Abstract

This article reconceptualizes the pharmacological term “off-label use” in the context of platforms and apps. It combines literature on technological appropriation with research on platforms’ sociotechnical arrangements to understand off-label use as platform appropriation. This conceptual work is applied to an investigation of Tinder, involving analysis of the platform, media articles, and interviews. Findings show that off-label use, such as marketing and campaigning, appropriates Tinder’s infrastructure and sociocultural meanings. Tinder also responds to disruptive off-label uses with changes in governance and infrastructure. This analysis shows how off-label use can locate user agency while uncovering shifting relations among users and platforms.

Keywords:

• Appropriation
• dating app
• disruption
• governance
• mobile apps
• platforms
• social media

Acknowledgments

This work owes much to several mentors and scholars who have helped me to think through these ideas. Thank you in particular to Tarleton Gillespie, Nancy Baym, Mary L. Gray and past interns, post-docs, visiting scholars, and members of the Social Media Collective. Thanks also to Kath Albury, Jean Burgess, and members of QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre. Thank you to the interview participants for sharing their time and perspectives with me.

Notes

1 I draw on Foucault’s (1979) conception of power as being in constant flux and negotiation among actors. Power is not localized within one authority but is produced through discourses of knowledge, such as when off-label actors develop a use to which they are privy but the platform has yet to notice and respond. I invoke the work of scholars like Bryan Pfaffenberger, who has linked his work to Foucault’s conception of power, in order to examine oscillations of power within processes of technological development.

2 Information and Communication Technologies.

3 Participants’ preferred names or pseudonyms are used throughout this article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted during a PhD internship at Microsoft Research New England.