Inviting the stranger in

Motelism

I’m very excited to publish a new article for Progress in Human Geography, co-authored with my friend and former PhD supervisor Dr Regan Koch. ‘Inviting the stranger in: Intimacy, digital technology and new geographies of encounter‘ has been two (2!) years in the making, with lots of coffee and post-work editing. After rewrites, rethinks and reviews, it’s finally out there in the world and it feels like our very own manifesto to the world (though I’m told delusions of grandeur are a sign of fatigue).

The Product

Regan and I had been talking for a year or two about how digital technologies are influencing the ways in which people meet each other, and what they meet each other for. When it comes to daily life for millions of people globally, meeting strangers online for intimate encounters has become the norm. Doing so offers experiences and rewards that are convenient, informative, sometimes meaningful, or which were simply less readily available previously. GPS-enabled dating apps (Tinder, Grindr, Happn) as well as sharing economy platforms (Uber, AirBnB, TaskRabbit) are built entirely on these kinds of stranger encounters.

Those of you who have read my work will know that it’s my ‘thing’ that digital technologies have progressed at such a dizzying speed that they have become incorporated into routine daily life faster than research can reflect on it, and that creates all sorts of questions that need to be explored and answered. I bang on about it all the time – what happens when you ‘meet’ someone on a dating app but when you convert online introduction to offline encounter they aren’t at all what you thought they’d be like? What kind of slippages happen in that shift? What is the etiquette for AirBnB – is your apartment owner a landlord, or a hotel receptionist, or a new friend who will give you the inside scoop on the city you’re visiting? Or are they all three, or another character altogether that you are having trouble interpreting?

We wondered if the idea of a ‘stranger’ is shifting from something unknown and potentially hazardous to something unknown and curious, or unknown but worth meeting, or even unknown but like-minded. Smartphone apps make meeting an unknown other a matter of choice not chance, and the processes often involve inviting a stranger into your actual home. What does this mean for how we relate to each other as a society? As we write:

As a society we have grown comfortable with stranger intimacies that would have seemed unusual in the recent past. App-based dating is the norm, the short-term letting of one’s home is common, and almost no one thinks twice about getting into a stranger’s car hailed via smartphone. Digital technology has helped to mitigate risks, but it has also changed the way people think and behave. The sociality of sex and dating has shifted such that many people are reluctant to approach someone in public for fear of rejection or embarrassment, yet are quite comfortable having intimate conversations online, discussing sexual preferences, sharing private photos and arranging at-home meetings. 

Our point is not that we are inviting the stranger ‘in’ for the first time because of digital technology – that’s happened for centuries, and as Blunt & Sheringham (2019) and others have pointed out, the idea of home as private makes no sense anyway. Our argument is more that the decision-making process around how we encounter strangers has shifted with digital technologies to make stranger intimacies happen differently today, in ways which deserve critical consideration. And as Regan points out, it’s not just dating apps that are changing our geographies of encounter: ride-sharing apps, holiday rental apps, childcare, domestic help and DIY apps all bring the stranger ‘in’ using platforms that verify ‘matches’ through ratings, rankings, or public profiles. These products are incredibly useful for many people, and like dating apps, they can broker valuable social connections. They do however come with their own exclusionary politics – the privilege of smartphone ownership and access to 3G; the racialised, gendered and social hierarchies that are always at play in services that sell your ‘self’ (and yes, that includes dating apps); and limitations imposed by geography, economics and availability.

There are both opportunities and challenges for users of these innovative products, and rather than coming out as ‘for’ or ‘against’ them, we’re interested in thinking about how they influence daily life for a whole range of people. Our point is that digital technologies are kickstarting social encounters and ways of thinking about strangers and intimacy that deserve more study. As a conclusion to the article we lay out some ideas for how to go about this kind of research, and we consider which voices might be less heard when undertaking that kind of endeavour. One thing is for sure: apps aren’t going anywhere, and they are so central to many people’s lives (and livelihoods) that sustained social science research is long overdue.

The Process

For me, working together on this paper highlighted the opportunity to think big-picture. Together, we developed ideas that we really do think are important and that we hope signal a step-change in geographical and sociological thinking about how digital technology is incorporated into how humans interact in contemporary societies.

What the process also showed to me was the value in thoughtful, considered, long-term thinking. My enthusiasm to get words on the page and my tendency to sketch things out without looking at them from a range of different perspectives and viewpoints was usefully tempered by Regan’s slower and more methodical way of working. In a surprise to no-one, my random torrents of ideas, scatter-gunned on the page, really do benefit from another pair of eyes and another person’s thoughts. I have never written an article as closely with another person as this. My other co-authored pieces are certainly collaborative, but follow a more straightforward process of meeting with co-authors to discuss a topic and themes, circulating a growing text document, and meeting up again here and there in person (or now remotely) to continue our discussion. Different people take responsibility for different sections and we comment on each other’s ideas and arguments, but different papers have different ‘owners’. This is generally a good thing because it means that in a group effort, someone is corralling the process and making content and editorial choices.

But what was interesting about this piece was how it followed all of the above protocols but more intensely. This one document was more rewritten and revised, and more discussed, and more agonised over – line by line – than I’ve ever experienced, including my own PhD. The reading and researching was significantly slower, as was the writing process. We discussed theory a lot – far more than I would have chosen to, left to my own devices – in ways that made my brain melt but got me truly thinking analytically. It’s a time-consuming way of doing things and we could’ve filled the word limit three or four times over with the text content we ending up cutting, but the finished result hopefully speaks to a really concentrated product. I guess it’s like orange squash – Regan made me make sure that every line counted, every reference was thought-through and read (and re-read – Regan, if you’re reading this, know that I have never known a more thorough academic) and that every argument was ‘needed’ in an academic context where total written output grows exponentially by the day. I can’t speak for Regan, but I know that it was a productive process for me.

This kind of co-authorship takes time and that these things are corners that cannot be cut. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about with my LSHTM colleagues when it comes to co-production – something that we call ‘slow co-production‘ – but I guess I hadn’t applied it in my mind to the writing process itself, as someone who flings words on the page at a rate of knots. So here’s to more thoughtful writing.

And as for the paper? Now that it’s finished and out there in the world, we hope it takes on a life of its own.

The finished product

Oh, What Do You Do To Me? the City says to Tinder

Happy new year! 2020 opens with something fun, because we all know academia hurts the brain coming so soon after a winter break spent mostly horizontal.

I was recently invited by The {Urban Political} podcast to give an interview on dating apps and urban geographies. The {Urban Political} produces podcasts on ‘contemporary urban issues with activists, scholars and policy-makers’ that aim to advance our understanding of urban environments and how we might make them more democratic. They wanted to discuss my research on the relations between online dating apps and the production of urban space, especially with regards to sex and sexualities. I said yes because I was so intrigued by the questions presenter Dr Markus Kip posed:

Do apps like Grindr and Tinder make the city a more loving place? Do they make dating more safe for women or trans people? And do they cohere greater acceptance of queer cultures, or the opposite?

These are important questions. When put to you by someone not in your head, as it were, they have the helpful effect of sharpening focus on what is really at stake when it comes to the reality (and future) of digital technology and the welfare of sexual minorities.

People’s lived experiences are important. Thinking about the consequences of changing physical environments through the use of dating and hook-up apps beyond simplistic readings of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ offers us a real opportunity to think critically about what these platforms mean not just for individual users, but more widely for society, community and geopolitics.

That’s not all: in the podcast we also discuss what app companies do with the data that users provide (whether willingly or unknowingly), and what ethical boundaries are being tested in this kind of data sharing – as well as the ethics of app use itself. I’ve argued before that locative media technologies have grown at such a rapid pace that mutually-agreed social codes for use are yet to catch up with the development of these sophisticated platforms, which can lead to clashing expectations between users. I believe these (perfectly valid) tensions will be replicated and amplified across a wide range of social networks and ‘smart’ technologies in the near future as digital technologies become progressively more integrated into our daily lives.

As for the question ‘what needs to happen at an individual, collective or technological level to make online dating more useful or pleasant?’, there are any number of answers, and for me none of them are definitive. It’s become clear over recent years that dating apps are not an alternative utopian world, free from the ugliness of ‘real'(!!) life – numerous reports of racism (special mention for #KindrGrindr), femmephobia and fat-shaming on just Grindr alone exemplify exactly that. But maybe there is space for a future of sociality, solidarity and support (#SSS?) for sexual minorities who network online. We already see these kinds of networks in action in queer organising, online communities, and support groups at various scales and in various guises. There is no reason why dating and hook-up apps cannot similarly be collectively co-opted to embrace more ‘promiscuous’ socialisation to combat loneliness, more political solidarity with a range of queer identities and livelihoods, and more support for sexual rights agendas, whether they be PrEP provision or sexual & reproductive health rights. We can make it a 2020 resolution, can’t we?

You can listen to the podcast here, and check out other Urban Political podcasts here. There’s plenty to choose from, from the Hong Kong protests to heritage vs. gentrification. Thank you Urban Political for inviting me to be a part of the movement!

Not My Type? Queer male practice-based identities online

Motelism 2017

I was invited last year by Andrew Gorman-Murray and Catherine J. Nash to write a chapter for their new book, The Geographies of Digital Sexuality.

I thought for a long time about what to write about. My work has been moving over time from queer male technologies and fieldwork ethics to sexual behaviour, and from there to sex and sexuality more generally, as our new ACCESS project at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine develops. I’m still fascinated by technology, sex and relationships, but looking globally at some of these relationships in very different contexts – marginalised populations, challenging settings, and complex geopolitical environments in the global South. I’m well aware that gay and bisexual men in Europe and north America are a comparatively privileged sexual minority, and that the lives and experiences of a wider range of people need further amplification – especially given common misunderstandings about technology use in socioeconomically disadvantaged settings. People are often surprised to hear that smartphones are used almost everywhere in the world. This includes within seriously deprived settings, where it may be the single most important object for a family’s livelihood or income. That does not mean it is not also used for communicating, partner-seeking, or pornography in any number of these settings.

Nevertheless, one of the things that people still ask me a lot about when they hear about my PhD and its research into smartphone dating apps is about people’s behaviour online: things that people complain about seeing again and again. It’s as if there are a list of the ‘usual suspects’ to be wary of when using dating or hook-up apps, from the ubiquitous time-waster (‘talk, talk, talk, and yet never agrees on concrete plans to meet up) to the catfish (‘Amazingly good looking but interested in me!’, or ‘keen to meet but there’s something weird about the photos’).

In the words of Carrie Bradshaw (sorry): It got me to thinking… Could we sketch out different ‘types’ of dating app user? Would those ‘types’ translate between queer and heterosexual? Do different apps host different types?

My qualitative fieldwork suggested that male-male apps contained ‘types’ that were far more specifically defined, and more commonly recognised by a whole range of users, than anything I was reading about being theorised elsewhere, so I looked into it further and developed three ‘types’ of user: the Embracer, the Timewaster, and the Minimalist. Whilst the vignettes I write in the chapter are fictional, they are amalgamated from a range of real-life users I spoke to, augmented by the profiles of other users that my participants discussed repeatedly (and usually in strongly positive or strongly critical ways). These profiles build an interesting picture of different modes of use for a market-dominant app like Grindr or Tinder. These profiles, and the strong feelings they provoke in others, also speaks to an argument I bang on about a lot: that the social codes of these GPS-enabled apps have yet to catch up to their digital sophistication. The result is user enthusiasm for what these platforms can offer in meeting new people – especially important for sexual minorities – tempered by real frustrations about other people not taking the app seriously, or taking it too seriously, or just not reflecting the user’s desired path to encounter.

Even more fascinating perhaps is the finding that the Timewaster – an app user who is keen to chat, seemingly reciprocates interest, and yet keeps postponing a date or other physical meeting, seemingly content to exist only in cyberspace – is almost universally criticised by users. Yet many of these same users sometimes exhibit precisely this behaviour themselves. This paradox serves to emphasise that we must not think of ‘types’ or user typologies as somehow fixed, but instead flexible categorisations that users might adopt, consciously or not, at different times in their app use over time. You may not see yourself as a time-waster because it’s not a trait you think is very attractive, but that doesn’t mean that sometimes you’re not that person to another frustrated user.

Feeling a bit seen right now? Don’t worry, everyone seems to fit some of these behaviours some of the time, and that’s no bad thing. But thinking more about what these categories mean and how social and/or sexual connection happens (or doesn’t happen) online can help us to think about larger questions far beyond the scope of dating apps like who we are when we’re online, and why that still feels ‘removed’ or disembodied from what should by now be a more taken-for-granted, ‘smoother’ hybridised digital-physical reality.

Still feeling seen? The chapter is called ‘Going the Distance: Locative Dating Technology and Queer Male Practice-Based Identities’ and you can read it here, or view the full book listing here.

Let’s talk about sex

Motelism, 2014

I was invited by the journal Area to write a blog for their outreach website Geography Directions, based on my recent (open access) article ‘“I’ve never told anyone this before”: Co‐constructing intimacy in sex and sexualities research’. I’m reblogging what I wrote here, in case readers find it interesting. In it, I discuss how researchers go about interviewing people about sex and sexualities, and question the extent to which we should share our own experiences as researchers. Think of it as a guide to some of the ethics of fieldwork in sex and sexualities research for the uninitiated. It’s something I get asked about a LOT!

The (in)famous male-male dating and hook-up app Grindr recently celebrated its 10^th birthday. To mark the anniversary, a whole range of articles have cropped up variously celebrating and lamenting Grindr’s influence across the world (by which I mean literally across the world – it counts nearly 4 million active users across 234 different countries (Grindr, 2019)). What makes this generation of mobile phone matchmakers different from the online platforms that went before them, for example Gaydar, match.com, Yahoo chatrooms? Apps such as Grindr are GPS-enabled, which enables users to ‘rank’ other users of the app by proximity, ensuring that potential matches can be discovered and introduced in real-time across physical space.

Reflecting on Grindr’s first decade, The BBC identifies a ‘rocky relationship’, whilst VICE magazine explores Grindr’s relationship with identity fraud and drug-based ‘chemsex’; meanwhile, Gay Times reports that 56% of Grindr users believe they can find true love on the app. Whatever your opinion on it – and there are many – there is no doubt that this mobile phone matchmaker, along with its competitors Hornet, Scruff & Jack’d, has had a profound impact on gay and bisexual communities. These apps have also opened up new avenues for men seeking sex with men (MSM) who for whatever reason – familial, cultural, or religious – do not identify as gay or bisexual.

Grindr stock image

The bigger question raised by these recent articles seems to be: how do dating and hook-up apps impact on same-sex and queer relationships today? This question cannot be answered by quantitative usage data alone. After all, we know that high usage does not necessarily mean high popularity. We need to explore peoples’ real life experiences in order to more fully understand the impact of dating and hook-up apps on same-sex and queer relationships.

I decided that the best way to get a detailed understanding of how these apps influence sexual and social behaviours would be to interview users about their experiences online, offline, and in the ‘hybrid’ space bridging the two, where virtual introductions result in real-life encounters. My doctoral research revealed some important findings: (1) that dating and hook-up apps play a significant role in how men now meet other men, especially within wider debates about the ‘death of the gay bar’, and (2) that the relationship between mobile phone dating app users and the people they meet can be awkward, with social cues yet to catch up to the sophistication of the technologies in use.

The sensitive nature of the research topic meant that there was an array of ethical and practical challenges for me to grapple with during my doctoral fieldwork. In my recent Area paper, I reflect on some of these challenges and explore how researchers and participants can work together to create a meaningful space that not only enables data collection, but facilitates honest and valuable conversation. I consider what the researcher’s responsibility should be for a participant’s safety in this discursive space. I also reflect on how ‘involved’ I should be as a researcher. I’m a person, not a robot, and several decades of feminist research has already explored the strengths and issues bound up in bringing ‘yourself’ into the research field (for example, see Bain & Nash (2006) and Smith (2016)). But the opposite extreme of the objective, positivist robot researcher is the inappropriately involved one, a role which would be both institutionally unethical and personally unacceptable. I therefore identified my own boundaries as well as the participants’s boundaries. The result was a co-constructed discursive space that we worked together to construct, perhaps surprisingly, in totally public venues and in one-off, hour-long interviews rather than more private or longer-term meetings. These were not ‘intimate’ spaces in a traditional sense, but nevertheless the space-within-a-space that we constructed invited app users to speak about highly personal experiences, some for the first time ever.

I also make the case for the using public places for staging sensitive conversations. The assumption that private matters cannot be discussed in public requires a rethink. Public spaces like libraries or cafes enfold within them more private spaces – not just actual booths or nooks, although these can contribute – but I’m thinking here about more conceptual spaces. These are built simply via one-to-one, in-person conversation in a space where a hubbub of background talking, or the hiss of coffee machines brewing, provides a backdrop to conversation that can be very productive.

Finally, when it comes to dating and hook-up apps in particular, I suggest that people are particularly keen to share their views because the social norms of dating app use are so complex and still so poorly understood. For lots of people online dating remains taboo. In this context, the chance to share their thoughts, feelings and experiences when it came to the digitally-introduced, physically-involved relationships these platforms offer may have been liberating.

Love dating apps or hate them (or both), what I hope the article communicates is that we need to talk more with users about the ways in which technologies impact on our personal lives, in order to think about the social codes developing from their use that will inform a whole range of wider contexts.

References:

Bain, A., & Nash, C. (2006) Undressing the researcher: Feminism, embodiment and sexuality at a queer bathhouse event. Area, 38, 99–106. https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2006.00663.x

Damshenas, S. (2019) 56% of Grindr users believe they can find love on the app, study finds. Gay Times. Retrieved from: https://www.gaytimes.co.uk/community/119691/56-of-grindr-users-believe-they-can-find-love-on-the-app-study-finds/

Fox, L. (2019) 10 years of Grindr: A rocky relationship. BBC News. Retrieved from: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47668951

Grindr. (2019) Grindr.com. Retrieved from: https://www.grindr.com/

Miles, S. (2017) Sex in the digital city: location-based dating apps and queer urban life. Gender, Place & Culture, 24, 1595-1610: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1340874?tab=permissions&scroll=top

Miles, S. (2018) Still getting it on online: Thirty years of queer male spaces brokered through digital technologies. Geography Compass. e12407. ISSN 1749-8198 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12407

Miles, S. (2019) “I’ve never told anyone this before”: Co‐constructing intimacy in sex and sexualities research. AREA. https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/area.12550

Smith, S. (2016) Intimacy and angst in the field. Gender, Place & Culture, 23, 134–146.

Staples, L. (2019) Grindr Users Talk Highs and Lows After Ten Years of the App. VICE Magazine. Retrieved from: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59x83d/grindr-users-talks-highs-and-lows-after-ten-years-of-the-app-1

Still getting it on online: queerness & technology

Cupid’s arrow, lovestruck…you get the picture. (Motelism, 2015)

This latest blog post is adapted from a piece I wrote this week for the DEPTH research group at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. In it, I discuss the publication of my new academic article ‘Still getting it on online: Thirty years of queer male spaces brokered through digital technologies’ in the journal Geography Compass. If you’re interested in geographies of sexualities, queer theory or space, think of this post as a sort of primer to introduce you to some of the wordier(!) themes explored in the article itself. 

 

By way of introduction, I thought I’d borrow from my latest article to give you a snapshot of what I’ll be talking about in this blog post:

I call on contemporary scholarship to demonstrate how [mobile phone] platforms offer a way into answering larger cultural questions about cruising, queer social life, and space. I conclude that these locative digital media occupy a distinctive position in the history of queer technologies and signal a shift in how gay male online spaces are both conceptualised and experienced.

In the social sciences, theories of sex and sexuality have long been tied up in ideas of space and place. There are any number of examples we can think of, from the spaces of sex work and how these spaces are regulated or policed, to the rise (and more recently, fall) of the commercialised ‘gay village’ in the global north, which is often discussed in terms of its relations with economics and gentrification.

Trying to better understand the relationship between sex and sexuality and space is important because beyond theoretical ideas, it has an impact on how a location might influence sexual identity, practices or safety. For example, healthcare interventions for sex workers might depend on a safe space accessible from their working space. Civil rights demonstrations or an LGBTQ pride parade in a repressive political environment can be read as a temporary ‘queering’ of the orthodoxy or regime by making space for sexual difference in streets normally controlled by the mainstream. For a real-life example of this, you check out an old blog post of mine on the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida and why sexuality and space are important concepts.

My own research has focused on digital technology and sexual practices (you can read previous blog posts on it this work here and here). I have been interviewing ‘MSM’ (men who have sex with men, including but not limited to gay and bisexual men) to learn more about how recent developments in technology mean that queer male space is not just physical, but virtual too.

 Geography Compass invited me to write an article for them reviewing the history of queer male online space. I think this topic is particularly fascinating is because the social sciences have long tracked physical queer spaces, and this research is widely known; less is known about how online platforms contribute to producing or re-making queer spaces. What I specialise in is locative media – by which I mean GPS enabled mobile phone apps – that are now very popular amongst MSM to network and meet others for social and/or sexual connection. These locative apps include Tinder, Grindr and Hornet, and have a huge user base around the world. Grindr alone counts nearly 4 million users per day.

I argue that the development of mobile internet over the past decade, and the GPS abilities that are now built into even basic smartphones, strongly influence how men meet other men for relationships and sex. This in turn has an impact on ‘offline’ LGBTQ venues such as gay bars or cruising sites, as well as traditional understandings of ‘queer community’ and what that might mean. As I write in the article:

Male–male locative media can strengthen and extend social‐sexual networks, facilitating meetings with like‐minded men across a borough, district, or city. This is especially true among the users for whom a queer community is out of reach because of their isolation, whether familial, social, or geographical.

Of course, being connected to other sexual minorities through an app does not automatically constitute a community, but some users do report a sense of like-mindedness, even if this does not match up with the more established ways in which we define community.

Beyond MSM populations specifically, this idea of technology redefining community, whether for better or worse (or indeed both!) is crucial to how we understand how technology mediates human behaviour. In a public health context, technology needs to be harnessed in ways which are alert to local conditions, whether that is in terms of unequal access to technology, or an affinity (or restriction) to certain kinds of communication device. At the same time, the widespread adoption of mobile phone technology – 5 billion people worldwide now have access to mobile phones – shows that digital technology ‘on the go’ will become ever more central to daily life. The job now is to extend research carried out on mobile digital technologies and sexualities to different populations to help us understand more about how these platforms will impact on social and sexual practices in the near and distant future.

You can read the full article here and follow my Twitter updates on it (and unrelated rants about Brexit, Trump and the tabloid press here, as well as Twitter updates from the DEPTH research hub for you social scientists and public health fans out there.

Submission Day

Fabulous! Motelism 2015 (to make up for not featuring as the PhD thesis cover)

I’ve been away for a while now, prioritising putting the finishing touches to my PhD, but today I bring good news… the thesis is submitted! It’s been a fascinating, mind-expanding and often confusing 4 year journey, but I’ve now contributed 99,000 words on my research project. That’s longer than some of the books on my nightstand (although possibly less suited to summer holiday reading)! Here is the finished product, with all three copies printed:

The PhD journey isn’t yet finished – I have a viva voce still to come in several months, which is my verbal defence of the work I have done, and I am crossing my fingers that the examiners find the work submitted impactful and relevant. I can’t call myself Dr yet, but one of the things I like about academia is that it is not afraid to really test those who are hoping to reach the post-doctoral stage, so I’m putting plans in place already to think about what I need to think about in preparation for the viva in October.

As for the PhD, since several of you have asked: I investigated the role of locative media – that is, GPS-enabled mobile phone dating apps including Grindr and Tinder – on queer urban geographies. The research was based across social sciences – a bit of human geography, some queer theory, and even some technology studies (and I still can’t make excel spreadsheets proficiently, so I can’t vouch entirely for the PhD process). I wanted to analyse how new forms of technology that prioritise physical space rather than virtual connection impact minority populations – in this scenario, non-heterosexual men living and working in London, but equally the findings can be extrapolated to think more widely about how youth seek information online, or how sexual or ethnic minorities consider themselves as part of a community (or not). How do locative media influence interactions with the city, and how do users ‘hybridise’ their digital and physical relationships? What does ‘hyperconnection’ mean, and what do the daily experiences of technology users seeking social or sexual encounter look like?

This research is relevant to academic thinking on how humans think about and adopt mobile technologies into their daily practices. Essentially, I argue that we now integrate this kind of pervasive technology into our lived experience (phenomenology) to an unprecedented extent, and this has good outcomes – for example journey planning on the tube or bus – and more ambiguous outcomes – for example an ‘always on’ culture that leaves people desperate for a digital detox on their holidays. This research also presents interesting impacts for policy initiatives, such as how we communicate information from government, or how people seek sexual health advice online.

When it comes to the queer theory part, the picture gets even more interesting. For one thing, these apps are bound up in the dissolving of once-popular LGBT venues in a city like London – lots has been written about this shift, but check out this Guardian article for a précis of the changes. However, I found that already-existing social and economic shifts probably play a larger role, certainly in large cities of the global north like London, Manchester and Madrid, to which apps contribute by dint of their popularity in the current dating environment. In the process, apps tend to make the home a concrete space for social or sexual connection, and for app users that has positive and negative repercussions.

The real highlight of this research for me was the volunteer time offered by 36 participants, whom I interviewed over one year. Their willingness to share their (often highly personal) stories with me really was the making of this research. I made sure my acknowledgements page really spoke to that, because I couldn’t have done this project without them. For anyone reading who was involved in the project, thank you again.

It was also really important to me to dedicate the PhD thesis to my friend Chris, who sadly died last year. Chris’s death prompted me to write this piece about the importance of expressing to our friends how much they mean to us, something that I think is vitally important. In the year since Chris’s death, I can testify that making sure your friends know how much they mean to you does nothing but good things. I recommend it to everyone. Show your friends they are loved! Chris is really missed by us all.

Finally, I’m sure you’re all dying to have a read of the thesis, right?(!) I can’t share the work until the viva is completed, because that dictates what the finished product looks like. From there I am planning to write several academic and mainstream articles from the thesis that I hope will be of interest. Until then, you can read my recently-published article in Gender, Place & Culture if you have a University log-in. If not, email me via the ‘contact‘ tab of this blog and I’ll send you a PDF.

Thanks again to everyone who helped me get the PhD this far over the past 4 years, from institutional level – especially my supervisors Dr Regan Koch and Dr Yasmin Ibrahim at Queen Mary, University of London – to the friends and family (with a special mention to someone who already has Dr in front of her name – Laura, who turns 30 today!)

Next stop, examination.

Review: What Belongs to You

‘So it is that at the very moment we come into full consciousness of ourselves what we experience is leave-taking and a loss we seek the rest of our lives to restore’ (34)

 

What Belongs to You (2016)

I first heard about Garth Greenwell and his new novel, What Belongs to You, via a pre-release review in a U.S. newspaper back last winter. The review was almost hyperbolic in its breathless praise for the book, which piqued my interest, only to find it wasn’t yet available in the U.K. But I had one of those experiences where once you’ve heard of someone o
nce, they crop up continually. Garth Greenwell and this beautiful bookcover suddenly seemed to be everywhere. It was covered in the Guardian, London Review of Books, and the New York Times, and discussed by queer theory enthusiasts at Queen Mary (so basically me, to several undergraduates trying to politely ignore me). As I told more and more friends about this new gay novel apparently making waves across the Atlantic, I thought I should probably get my hands on a copy to check it out for myself. As I framed it to Garth’s publicist, it might be interesting to think about the work in academic terms. And reader, it is.

The book opens with a cruising scene in a public toilet in Sofia, Bulgaria. The narrator almost immediately introduces the reader to Mitko: part-hustler, part-crook, all enigma. The (male) narrator’s desire for Mitko is palpable, and their journey, which reads at time like more of a struggle, proceeds through uneasy exchanges of sex for money over several months. This in turn leads to a deeper attachment – seemingly for both characters – trying in their own ways to understand the terms of the relationship. Don’t be fooled by the sex: far from being disinhibited or sexy, the narrative cleverly constricts into a melancholy and at times almost painful reflection on everything from family to memory, and from identity in the present to ideas of home in the past. Still, the sex remains important, because it is how the narrator (who may or may not touch on autobiography; I couldn’t ultimately decide) and Mitko battle for symbolic status against each other.

Yet for a novel set in 2012 (or at least it is if the earthquake Greenwell describes refers to the Pernick earthquake), locative (i.e. mobile) dating and hook-up apps such as Grindr are almost totally absent, despite regular instances of online encounter in the novel. There are, however, frequent references to the economic and social value of mobile phones in a country where most of the population is institutionally poor. Meanwhile, the digital interfaces of desktop-based male networking sites are one of the couple’s main contentions. Mitko frequently prioritises his online life and related attachments above his embodied prescence in the narrator’s real home. Greenwell has a real eye for detail – we readers have no trouble hearing the ‘chime’ noise of a new Skype conversation from across the room, which stops Mitko from attending to the couple’s precious shared time. But Greenwell doesn’t let his protagonist off the hook either. This is someone self-aware enough to admit that the persona he inhabits online is subjective and fluid, mediated by the context in which he wants to appear:

‘It’s one of the things I crave in the sites I use, that I can carry on these multiple conversations, each its own window so that sometimes my screen is filled with them; and in each I have the sense of being entirely false and entirely true, like a self in a story suppose, or the self I inhabit when I teach, the self of authority and example.’ (70)

 

Garth Greenwell (Twitter)

Thus Greenwell defines perfectly the double-bind of technology. These virtual realities allow the user to be whomever they want to be; but in such a freeing space without physical constraint, how can anyone ever be sure that those with whom they communicate with are not themselves also constructing imagined identities? What is at stake when we can be truly ourselves – or, indeed, truly unlike ourselves – online? For a technology ostensibly designed to speed up people-matching, little time seems to be saved. Greenwell is refreshingly alert to some of the issues at stake here; I only wish there was more fiction writing in press right now cohering around these technological debates.

Greenwell also has a flair for describing place, and this works very effectively throughout the narrative as an anchor for the reader. I know nothing whatsoever about Sofia, Plovdiv, or Bulgaria more widely, and yet it felt like familiar territory seen through Greenwell’s eyes. This was particularly the case in what almost read like a standalone scene late in the novel, set on a train (fear not for spoilers: I’ll keep them to myself). The protagonist manages to dovetail an account of a playing child on a train with a sort of ode to Bulgarian scenery, mixed with reflection on the passing of time, and – if that weren’t enough – thoughts on mother-child relationships. It makes for a very tender, bittersweet passage, and now, a week on, I still remember it as my favourite part of the whole book.

Elsewhere, What Belongs to You remind

Varna, Bulgaria in winter (SwissOnline

ed me of Alan Hollinghurst’s fiction, not least because of its strong geographical context. But whereas Hollinghurst had an easy sell in terms of fleshing out his protagonist’s spatial context via a familiar London – split between the rich, establishment city and the counter-cultural cruising scene (most memorably in The Swimming Pool Library), few readers of What Belongs to You will have even a rudimentary knowledge of the novel’s Bulgarian setting. It is only by looking back at Hollinghurst’s catalogue that I see how easily British readers can frame Hollinghurst’s stories, even those less familiar with London, because the action is so embedded in the landmarks, streets and parks that have long been a part of our cultural capital. Greenwell has none of these cues for anyone unfamiliar with Bulgaria, and his novel is all the more interesting for it. I got a clear sense of this Balkan city. In Greenwell’s prose it reads as a place wounded by its Soviet past, particularly in architectural terms; yet nor is it fully fledged in a Western Capitalist context. Greenwell’s description of the coastal Black Sea resort of Varna in winter is fascinating – this is a country where tourism is new and cruelly seasonal, and it is almost natural that the geographical surroundings reflect the narrator’s mournful progress.

If only someone else hadn’t bagsied The Sense of An Ending already, Greenwell might have put the moniker to good use. This is a novel all about change and changing, beginnings and endings. Despite the big themes, this is a slim book, and the narrative lacks at times full exploration of its different subplots. For example we learn tantalizingly little about the Sofian American school, despite it surely providing rich pickings for character and story. Who are the expats of Bulgaria? Why did they choose Sofia, and for how long have they lived there? Yet this minimalism leaves us wanting more – an approach that many of Greenwell’s contemporaries would do well to observe. Taken as a whole, this is an impressive, poetic new chapter in the queer canon, and it fully deserves the praise it is receiving.

Hand-held: thoughts on locative media

“Tinder is the Grindr for straight people.”

-Interview participant, 21, gay, London.

Setting the online scene

What is it exactly about dating apps that capture our imaginations? And how do we form narratives about different apps – narratives that suggest that Grindr is more for hook-ups than long-term relationships, or that Tinder requires less commitment than Plenty of Fish?

Tinder (Business of Apps 2016)

Grindr, Tinder, and other dating and other mobile apps are one of the many ways that technology can be said to permeate life in the contemporary city. These apps are (generally) free, portable, and always available. They mix dating with social media, and they promote a sense of immediacy, right down to their design – swipe left, swipe right. They have captured the imaginations of millions of users: at last count Grindr has been downloaded over 10 million times (Grindr 2016); Tinder currently boasts 50 million users on its books, with an impressive 10 million people logging on daily (DMR 2016).

Dating apps (HiConsumption 2016)

These apps have also captured the imagination of the media. To take just a few articles written this week alone, we can see the huge cultural signification these apps now command. It’s not just heterosexual coverage, either. Beyond the Telegraph’s piece on Bumble and the Guardian’s uncharacteristically breathless ‘Confessions of a menopausal nymphomaniac’, the BBC follows the growth of recent lesbian app Her, whilst U.S-based The Advocate cautions against dependence on gay dating apps.

My research

My own research explores the ways in which dating apps might inform, or change, users’ perception of where they go, who they meet, and what they do in the city. This is especially interesting because these apps are skewed to urban populations, and the apps are the first of a generation to use GPS (global positioning systems; Wikipedia nicely sketches out the wide scope of this technology) to introduce a spatial element to matchmaking, broadcasting your physical coordinates. This allows you to be ‘mapped’ in real, as well as digital, space, for the scrutiny of other users – as well as the software developers. Some apps use this mapping as a secondary feature. Tinder, for example, is all about the ‘swipe’, with the distance of matches listed and ordered but not prioritised – perhaps because in heterosexual contexts the power imbalances are unappealing. Meanwhile, other apps foreground proximity as the unique selling point of the product. Grindr ranks men on a grid like a visual smorgasbord, ordered from closest to furthest away. This in turn leads to interesting ideas about the app as a place of visual presentation and display – a marketplace of looks.

There has been a buzz growing around mobile-based dating apps for several years now, but we should not forget that the popularisation of location-enabled dating apps only really dates back to 2009, with the launch of Grindr. This was only narrowly predated by social network FourSquare (2009), the earliest mainstream locative mobile service. FourSquare maps your location when out and about, broadcasting your location to friends to assist in meeting up. Even Google maps, the behemoth of GPS-enabled locative services, only functioned as a locative (i.e. location informed) service on mobile devices from 2008.

For my research, I specifically talk to non-heterosexual men (that includes gay and bisexual men but also MSM[1] – men who have sex with men but who don’t identify as gay) about their use of dating and hookup apps including Grindr, Tinder, and Hornet, to explore how these apps figure in their daily lives – socially, sexually, and politically. Non-heterosexual men have a long history of social and sexual encounters via digital technology, from the list:servs and chatrooms in the early 1990s through to online institution Gaydar, founded in 1999 and now rather maligned in the face of newer mobile competition. Grindr was the first of all geolocative apps and, seven years on, has been a part of many men’s lives for long enough that they can verbalise the ways it has impacted on their day-to-day practice. What do their stories look like, and what do they tell us about mobile technology use?

Looking outwards

Now that these locative apps are firmly embedded in popular culture, what opportunities do they raise for users – and what risks?

Beyond my own results, researchers can use these findings to theorise more widely about how different social groups might use locative media in cities. This includes not just gay men but people seeking public health services, new arrivals in the city, young people, old people, and so on. In fact, it even ties into debates about the ‘Smart City’: cities around the world (crucially not just in the Global North) are developing computer systems for processing data coming out of social media and locative apps in order to gather information about their urban population and cater for them accordingly. The scenario can be seen as transformational or chilling, depending on how you look at it. So my research exists as a way of reviewing a form of technology that is finally ‘coming of age’. Now that these locative apps are firmly embedded in popular culture, what opportunities do they raise for users – and what risks?

Smart Cities Mission (2016)

[1] The term ‘MSM’ originally comes from public health literature as an attempt to de-stigmatise HIV transmission by showing that behaviour, not identity, place individuals at risk for HIV transmission. See Young & Meyer (2005) for history of the term, as well as arguments about overuse of the term.