Dating apps have received rapid uptake, with Tinder as one of the most popular apps in the heterosexual market. However, little research has investigated the experiences of women seeking women (WSW) on this app. This article combines two interview studies of WSW in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom to investigate their self-presentations of sexual identity on Tinder. By configuring settings to “seeking women,” participants perceived they were entering a space conducive to finding WSW. However, men, couples, and heterosexual women permeated this space, heightening the need for participants to signal non-heterosexual identity. Their signals fused references to lesbian and queer culture with Tinder’s infrastructure to evoke a digital imaginary, as a routinized set of practices imagined to resonate with a shared community. Although signals within this digital imaginary were sometimes playful and ambiguous, their default toward a recognizable lesbian identity often rendered other sexual or gender identities invisible.
Ethnography as a tool to evoke empathy is often denoted as a good in itself. How might the process of building empathy at scale work for (or even against!) the impact of ethnography in organizations?
“I got verbals, but verbals don't hold up in court….I need it in black and white.”
After Sheila submits hospital quality data to the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS), reports indicate that her data hasn't been received. She makes countless calls to the CMS Help Desk to get answers. They reassure her numerous times that they have her data, yet Sheila is insistent that she needs to see the change explicitly stated in the report. Sheila makes it her personal crusade to obtain material evidence because only written testimony will prove that her data has been submitted successfully and protect her facility from CMS penalties.
At a time when we are becoming increasingly reliant on data and technology as the ultimate bearers of truth, Sheila exemplifies how people become stewards of evidence in service to these technical systems. As she moves her facilities’ data through CMS’ error‐ridden reporting system, the burden of proof is on her to provide the type of evidence acceptable to demonstrate her facilities’ compliance with federal quality of care standards.
Throughout our paper, we explore the different practices that hospital employees and vendors take to demonstrate their facility's quality of care to CMS, identifying key elements of materiality, evidence and moral obligation. By weaving together their narratives of a responsibility to prove their truth to a capricious, data‐driven system, with theoretical concepts of “bearing witness” and governmentality, we reveal the ways in which digital data falls short of being sufficient evidence and the dangers inherent in shifting blame from a body of government onto the body of an individual.
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