Fragmented desire? Platform intimacy and the politics of care*

Abstract
This article argues that fragmentation is not the inevitable outcome of dating and hook-up apps, nor a simple synonym for the decline of intimacy. It is better understood as a recurrent tendency of platformized intimacy: the reformatting of intimate exchange into searchable, ranked, and monetizable units. Drawing on scholarship on digital intimacies, platform governance, and relational labor, the article shows how swipe-based abundance, algorithmic sorting, and continuous self-presentation can intensify provisionality, decision fatigue, and emotional exhaustion. At the same time, it rejects technological determinism by foregrounding user ambivalence, tactical agency, and the indispensable role that apps can play for LGBTQ+ users seeking safety, friendship, sexual publics, and recognition. The problem, then, is not digital intimacy as such, but the way intimate life is increasingly organized by extractive infrastructures whose benefits and harms are unevenly distributed. The article concludes by reworking an ethics of care as a political rather than nostalgic project: one that links platform accountability, differentiated safety protections, relational literacy, and labor protections for those whose intimate visibility is monetized.
Keywords: digital intimacies, platform intimacy, dating apps, care, algorithmic governance, sexual racism, queer media, relational labor.

* Yıldız, T. (2026). Fragmented desire? Platform intimacy and the politics of care. Media, Culture & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/016344372614669 

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