Flora Stone Mather Center for Women’s Hannah Regan explores the social impact of dating apps
In her new book Dating Apps, Modern Romance, and Social Inequality, Hannah Regan—associate director for research and evaluation at the Flora Stone Mather Center for Women at Case Western Reserve University—explores the impact dating apps have had on how we meet potential partners and decide who to date.
In particular, Regan considers our tendency to fall in love with people very similar to us and how dating apps facilitate this preference and challenge us to think outside the box. By sharing the stories of dating app users, Regan also raises important questions about how social inequality exists in our intimate lives, and how technology reinforces these long-held social beliefs.
Dating Apps, Modern Romance, and Social Inequality situates current patterns of dating and relationships within the historical context of courtship to explore how the introduction of new technology has changed romantic partnerships. Despite new possibilities, the analysis encourages us to question whether dating is, in fact, changing, or whether we are simply enacting the same old social patterns in new ways.
