"When Harry Met Sally (Via Dating App)": An affective approach to the techno-social world of Turkey's heterosexual online dating

This thesis aims to understand the heterosexual online dating world in Turkey and explain why people use dating technologies, how they use them and choose their potential partners. The relevant literature is predominantly quantitative, focuses on Anglo-American contexts, and generates similar arguments. However, this thesis suggests an affective turn, both theoretically and methodologically, to show different stories. To that end, it uses walkthrough, video interviews, and re-enactment techniques to examine social, cultural, technological, and affective factors influencing individuals' uses, preferences, motivations, expectations, and actions. The findings demonstrate that structural and material changes in life conditions, changes in norms regarding dating culture, technological design and aesthetics, appification, one's intersectional background, as well as affects, such as mood, sensation, and boredom, influence users' motivations, preferences, and activities. Based on the data from interviews with 40 heterosexual individuals, this thesis draws a portrait beyond the marketization discourse that dating platforms have brought economic logic into dating and structured it as a market. By introducing the concept of affect, it encourages more than binary perspectives, such as love-sex, beauty-status, technology-culture, and industry-practice, dominant in the heterosexual online dating literature.