A qualitative study of how young women at the University of Oxford collaboratively create their dating app profiles — and what that reveals about identity, the male gaze, algorithmic imaginaries, and the emotional labour of digital intimacy.
The questions inside this dissertation — how identity is co-curated online, how users imagine algorithms, how AI is becoming an intimate arbiter of taste — aren't only academic. They're the live questions creator agencies, UX teams, and AI & brand strategists are answering right now. Here's where this work plugs in.
My finding that dating profiles are co-authored by friend networks generalises directly to the creator stack — managers, editors, audiences, and AI agents shaping a single performance. Algorithmic folklore, the platform gaze, and the emotional labour of being online are all live problems for talent agencies and livestream platforms in 2026.
Ten semi-structured interviews. 691 hand-coded quotes in MAXQDA24. Seven axial categories refined into three core themes. The qualitative-research toolkit I built here transfers directly into design, product, and insights teams who need to know how users actually behave on their platforms — not just what the dashboards say.
One participant outsourced her dating-profile feedback to ChatGPT — a microcosm of the human-AI relationship now central to consumer AI products and brand strategy. The frameworks I lean on (Bucher's algorithmic imaginaries, Mulvey's gaze, Byron's cultures of care) read this cultural moment with unusual sharpness.
This dissertation asks how young female students at the University of Oxford collaboratively create their dating app profiles — and what that group activity reveals about identity online. Where previous scholarship has framed online dating as an individualised act, this thesis treats friendship as a cornerstone of digital identity production and intimacy.
Through ten semi-structured qualitative interviews with women aged 22–28, I examine how identity, authenticity, and visibility are negotiated during the collaborative practice of profile curation, and how those social practices are shaped by algorithmic imaginaries and the male gaze. Thematic analysis — grounded in feminist theory, digital sociology, and media studies — surfaces three core themes: the negotiation of authenticity in profile curation, the weight of unsaid rules, the male gaze & algorithms, and the emotional labour of digital dating.
Findings suggest profile curation is not an isolated act but a socially embedded process shaped by homosocial collaboration, resistance, and care. Through trusted friends, broader social and algorithmic structures are mediated within the online dating realm — repositioning modern digital dating as something traditionally interdependent on close friendship networks and, more recently, algorithmically enhanced.
Interpretivist, qualitative thematic analysis of homosocial profile curation. A hybrid of In Vivo and line-by-line coding refined 691 raw codes into seven axial categories and three global themes — a fourth emerged in the algorithmic register.
Drawing across feminist theory, digital sociology, and media studies — the analysis sits at the intersection of self-presentation, the male gaze, and algorithmic imaginaries.
Three global themes surfaced from thematic analysis. Inside Theme 02, a fourth strand — the algorithmic imaginary — emerged forcefully enough to stand on its own.
Authenticity is not a static disclosure but a dynamic, co-produced negotiation. Friends serve as co-curators and mirrors — selecting photos, editing prompts, and validating an "aspirational but true" version of the self. The profile becomes a curated exhibition (Hogan, 2010), where authenticity is partial and selective rather than deceptive.
Co-curation is shaped by a quiet inventory of unspoken rules: be desirable but not too much; have fun but not too much fun. Friends sometimes reinforced — and sometimes resisted — gendered standards, exposing the homosocial surveillance Winch (2013) describes as solidarity dressed as girlfriendship.
Participants narrated the algorithm without ever fully knowing it (Bucher, 2017). Friend networks pass down folkloric "hacks" — set your age range to 88–89, change your location, swap your top photo. A new layer emerged: women turning to ChatGPT as a quasi-objective co-curatorial gaze, sometimes outsourcing intimacy and feedback to AI.
Friendship is the infrastructure of digital dating — not just at profile creation, but through swiping, matching, dating, and recovery. Drawing on Byron (2021), friends absorb and redistribute the emotional labour of dating culture; rejection and awkwardness are reframed into stories, memes, and wine nights.
Direct quotes from participants — kept in the spirit of dating-app prompt cards.
It's like my dating app doppelganger – like the person that I am aspiring to be.
It felt like the first step of becoming objectified onto the platform — 'oh, this is how my friends who love me see me and would reduce me to something on a platform.'
A woman should be a little provocative, but not too provocative, should look like she's having a lot of fun, but not too much fun.
I spend the most time with myself. I know myself the best.
I want to present my personality, but I also know that it's just the algorithm looking for a certain thing and looking to pair you with certain people.
As a South Asian brown woman, I was just like, I'm not getting the best of this app. So why would I engage in it?
It's not really possible to know everything about a person from just like six photos and two prompts.
I wanted to have some feedback, because I thought — okay, I wanted to have someone who's objective.
It became like a fun little thing that we had kind of in the background of our friendship.
Challenges scholarship treating dating-app profiles as solo self-presentation. Profile curation is, in many cases, embedded in friendship-based acts of identity production.
Reframes online authenticity as a peer-negotiated concept — extending Winch (2013) and Duguay (2016) — rather than an individual disclosure.
Introduces a friends-as-co-conspirators reading of Bucher's algorithmic imaginary — and surfaces an emerging shift toward AI as an intimate arbiter of taste.
In a digital culture increasingly manufactured by algorithms and data, the everyday rituals of friend-group profile-making reaffirm the critical need for human-centric moments of care, support, and solidarity within the digital dating terrain.