Suchergebnisse

O presente artigo aborda o aplicativo de busca por parceiros entre homens Grindr, em seus aspectos linguísticos e semióticos, enfatizando as produções imagéticas e discursivas de seus usuários, concebidas enquanto performatividades. Foram entrevistados onze homens que utilizam a rede social, com foco em suas composições fotográficas e interações textuais com outros membros do aplicativo, analisadas posteriormente a partir das perspectivas butlerianas e barthesianas sobre a linguagem e sua interface com a imagem. Constatouse a composição de uma "gramática" produzida no interior do aplicativo, com significação particular de palavras e imagens e direcionamento comercial e midiático. Além disso, técnicas de composição e manipulação de fotografias, modulações do corpo e associação de práticas travadas no aplicativo a uma dimensão política foram abordadas pelos entrevistados. Desta forma, foi possível entender o Grindr como um "sistema de significação", no qual tais dinâmicas são produzidas, negociadas e disputadas no seu próprio uso. ; Le présent travail discute l'application de recontres pour hommes Grindr, dans ses aspects linguistique et sémiotique, en mettant l'accent sur les productions imaginaires et linguistiques de ses utilisateurs, conçues comme des performativités. Onze hommes qui utilisent ce réseau social ont été interviewés, en se concentrant sur leurs compositions photographiques et leurs interactions textuelles avec les autres membres, analysées par la suite dans les cadres des perspectives butlerienne et barthesiennes sur la langue et sa relation avec l'image. On a identifié la composition d'une "grammaire" produite à l'intérieur de l'application, avec une signification particulière des mots et des images, avec ciblage commercial et médiatique. En outre, les interviewés ont abordé les techniques de composition et de manipulation des photographies, les modulations corporelles et l'association de pratiques enfermées dans l'application à une dimension politique. Ainsi, il a été possible de comprendre le Grindr comme un "système de signification" où ces dynamiques sont produites, négociées et contestées dans leur propre usage. ; El presente artículo discute la aplicación de citas entre hombres Grindr, en sus aspectos linguísticos y semióticos, enfatizando las producciones de imágenes y lenguaje de sus usuarios, comprendidas como performatividades. Once hombres usuarios de Grindr fueron entrevistados, con foco en sus composiciones fotográficas y interacciones textuales con otros miembros de la red social, posteriormente analizadas a partir de las perspectivas butlerianas y barthesianas sobre el lenguaje y sus relaciones con la imagen. Se constató la producción de una "gramática" en el interior de la aplicación, con la significación particular de palabras y imágenes com dirección comercial y mediatica. Además, técnicas de composición y manipulación de fotografías, modulaciones del cuerpo y la asociación entre prácticas en la aplicación a cuestiones políticas fueron abordadas por los entrevistados. De esta manera, fue posible comprender Grindr como un "sistema de significación", dónde estas dinámicas son producidas, negociadas y disputadas en sus usos. ; In our study we discuss the gay dating app Grindr, considering its linguistic and semiotic aspects, emphasizing its users' imagery and linguistic productions, conceived as performativities. Eleven users of this social network were interviewed, focusing on their photographic compositions and textual interactions with other members, subsequently analyzed under Butlerian and Barthesian perspectives on language and its relation to image. A "grammar" with particular meanings of words and images with commercial and mediatic target was found out to be used within the application. Furthermore, techniques of photography, body improvement, and associations between practices and political issues were addressed by the interviewees. Therefore, we could understand Grindr as a "meaning system", where such dynamics are produced, negotiated and disputed in its uses.

One pervasive use of the Grindr mobile application is the initiation and accomplishment of pseudonymous sexual encounters between gay strangers based on location awareness. Not only are such encounters oriented towards quasi-immediate sexual gratification, but they are collaboratively done so as to preclude repeat encounters and relational development, with the protagonists supposedly left unaffected emotionally, relationally and socially by their meeting. This creates a rather special – and analytically interesting – interactional dilemma when Grindr users initiate a social contact with potential partners, usually through the chat function integrated into the mobile app. This article describes the way Grindr users have developed a particular 'linguistic ideology', which casts ordinary conversation as an interactional activity that is performed between (potential) friends and enables relational development. As such, it is unsuitable for one-time sexual encounters, the production of which is a distinctive and accountable interactional accomplishment. This article analyzes the special interactional practices based on profile-matching sequences which Grindr users have developed to circumvent the relational affordances of electronic conversation. These practices constitute Grindr users as a particular form of speech community, adjusted both to their orientation towards initiating 'purely' sexual encounters and to the socio-material design of the Grindr mobile application.

This article offers a framework to discuss when a community's data is moved abroad without their clear, informed consent, a practice I term data trafficking. I offer a comparative policy analysis of the case of Grindr, an LGBTQIA+ dating platform that has changed hands between China and the United States to demonstrate what data trafficking is, how it undermines national sovereignty, and how it erodes human rights. In the United States, corporate policies are the leading indicator for data governance practices, influencing a system known as multi-stakeholderism (DeNardis, 2013). In China, forced localization to government servers drives data governance practices (Mueller, 2017; Zeng et al., 2017; Kokas, 2018; Kokas, 2019). This article extends how we think about the relationship between the commercial data generated by individuals across multiple platforms, and how we understand transnational consumer data security.

Grindr is a popular location-based social networking application for smartphones, predominantly used by gay men. This study investigates why users leave Grindr. Drawing on interviews with 16 men who stopped using Grindr, this article reports on the varied definitions of leaving, focusing on what people report leaving, how they leave and what they say leaving means to them. We argue that leaving is not a singular moment, but a process involving layered social and technical acts – that understandings of and departures from location-based media are bound up with an individual's location. Accounts of leaving Grindr destabilize normative definitions of both 'Grindr' and 'leaving', exposing a set of relational possibilities and spatial arrangements within and around which people move. We conclude with implications for the study of non-use and technological departure.

Boundary works of Grindr research: Sociological and queer perspectives on shame and intimacy As a newly minted PhD student I am eager to explain to my colleagues what hook-up apps are and why we should care to look at them. One day at the University campus talking to a colleague I find myself out of words that satisfactorily describes the feeling of navigating the grid of Grindr, the hook-up app that my sexual biography as a gay man is inseparable of. I decide to "show don't tell'. In powering up the app on my iPad I get a sinking feeling. Perhaps this isn't right? Who will pop up in the grid of pictures, maybe in "challenging" positions? Students, staff, colleagues? As these thoughts make their way through my head the app has loaded and I find myself anxiously explaining the basic affordances in a swift, matter of fact style, and soon closing down the app, doing my best to move on. Introduction The issues at play in the above vignette (Humphreys 2005) represent at least two familiar issues: The media scholar working ethnographically finding that there seems to be "two there's there" (Schegloff 2002); and the queer, insider researcher coming into academia and moving back into the queer cultural spaces that they are emotional invested in and have privileged access to. Ethnography has a long tradition for using and thinking about the slipping and sliding of identities into cultural spaces. Due to the mediatization (Lundby 2014, Hepp 2015) of intimate encounters (Linke 2011, Peil 2014) media ethnographers face both a quantitative increase and a qualitatively changed situation. In the vignette, the fact that the Grindr app, by way of its locative abilities, displays users nearby ties directly into the felt discomfort: The fact that the community that is "exposed" comprises of students and faculty members that might not have attuned their sexualised self-presentations to such a gaze. Here the public-private expectations come into play, tying into established Internet scholarly debates on the ethical issues regarding these distinctions (Markham 2012, Marwick 2014). The paper argues that developments within queer, affective theory, as well as sociological and critical notions of intimacy, can shed new light on the challenges that media ethnographers encounter. It builds on the work done by queer ethnographic scholars, in that it interrogates not only the actions in fieldwork but also the distinctions and value hierarchies at play, and through that, the norms that put them in place. Further I take on the notion of intimacy to asses its analytical and critical potentials for unraveling the chronicled experience of shame. Shameful transgression The issues at play in the vignette attain to the feeling of shame in the face of what is perceived as a lacklustre negotiation of the classical ethnographical divide of insider and outsider knowledge, positioning, and identity. The vignette as well as the following general hesitancy to bring forward the field memo shows, that a researcher's affective investment in a given subject swiftly and determinately propels actions seeking to annul the experienced boundary transgression. Adding to the immediate implies for "damage control" shame both reveals taboos and seeks to erase actions that reveals the researcher as a transgressor. This is in line with queer and feminist works on affect (Ahmed 2004, Munt 2007, Bissenbakker 2013) that interrogates shame as moments that both reveal the investments that in turn produce and is produced by the affective response. These questions are critically discussed by way of the concept of 'safe space' and feminist ethics of care. Intimate boundary works There are phycological and sociological approaches that use it to describe types of interpersonal relationships (Giddens 1992, Baumeister 2007, Stempfhuber 2011, Nordqvist 2013). Related to this approach is the understanding that intimacy is something that is done, that is practiced. It can be understood as arising from boundary works (Jamieson 2005, [Auhor of this paper] forthcoming) and thus be ontologically entangled with the meeting of the prospect of boundary transgression that marks the end of intimacy. Lauren Berlant on the other hand sees intimacy as: …the processes by which intimate lives absorb and repel the rhetorics, laws, ethics, and ideologies of the hegemonic public sphere, but also personalize the effects of the public sphere and reproduce a fantasy that private life is the real in contrast to collective life: the surreal, the elsewhere, the fallen, the irrelevant. (Berlant 1998) The production of a public/private divide serves to orient subject attention towards interpersonal matters, making invisible the forces that define which exact distinctions to police. This paper argues for an integrative approach, an amalgamation of sociological and critical intimacy theory. The paper argues that intimacy understood as boundary work between individuals is valuable in its bringing out the mechanics of being in public or private. It is also the level in which affective investments operate, which promotes critical methodological and ethical reflection. The critical perspective is also important in that it targets the very establishment of public and private realms, something that multilayered media practice complicates. It is argued that a critical approach to intimacy must take into account the ways that seemingly public, online visibilities and actions through discursive and affective work become intimate encounters. References Ahmed, S. (2004): The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge. Baumeister, R. F., & Vohs, K. (2007). Encyclopedia of social psychology, 498–499. Berlant, L. (2016). Intimacy : A Special Issue, 24(2), 281–288. Bissenbakker, Mons. (2013). Krumme tæer: Skam i krydsfeltet mellem queer, feministiske og postkoloniale teorier. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, (1), 25–36. Jørgensen, K. M. (in review). Grænsekrydser, backstabber og opportunist: Praksisbaseret etik som intimt grænsearbejde. Giddens, A. (1992). The transformation of intimacy: Sexuality, love and eroticism in modern societies. Oxford: Polity press. Hepp, A., Hjarvard, S., & Lundby, K. (2015). Mediatization: theorizing the interplay between media, culture and society. Media, Culture & Society, 37(2). Humphreys, M. (2005). Getting Personal: Reflexivity and Autoethnographic Vignettes. Qualitative Inquiry, 11(6), 840–860. Jamieson, L. (2005). Boundaries of Intimacy. In S. Cunningham-Burley (Ed.), Families in Society. Boundaries and relationships (pp. 189–205). Polity press. Linke, C. (2011). Being a couple in a media world: The mediatization of everyday communication in couple relationships. Communications, 36(1), 91–111. Lundby, K. (ed.) (2014). Mediatization of Communication: Handbooks of Communication Science, vol. 21. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Marwick, A., & Boyd, D. (2014). Networked privacy: How teenagers negotiate context in social media. New Media & Society. Markham, A., & Buchanan, E. (2012). Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research Recommendations from the AoIR Ethics Working Committee. Recommendations from the AoIR Ethics Working Committee (Version 2.0), 19. Munt, S. R. (2007) Queer Attachments. The Cultural Politics of Shame. Ashgate. Nordqvist, P. (2013): Lesbian love and the troublesome sperm donor: intimacy, normality and morality in new stories about conception. In: Sanger, T., Taylor, Y. (ed.): Mapping Intimacies: relations, exchanges, affects. Palgrave Macmillan. Peil, C. & Röser, J. (2014). The Meaning of Home in the Context of Digitization, Mobilization and Mediatization. In: Hepp, A., & Krotz, F. (Eds.). Mediatized Worlds. Palgrave Macmillan. Schegloff, E. (2002). Beginnings in the Telephone. In J. Katz & M. Aakhus (Eds.), Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance (pp. 284–300). Cambridge University Press. Stychin, C. (1998). A nation by rights: National cultures, sexual identity politics and the discourse of rights. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Wir beschäftigen uns in diesem Aufsatz mit Phänomenen netzgängiger Beziehungsinitiierung und der Relevanz von Dating-Apps im intersubjektiven Geschehen. Neben der skizzenhaften Aufarbeitung eines komplexen und ambivalenten Forschungsstandes stellen wir die Ergebnisse einer Interviewstudie mit Nutzer*innen solcher Apps vor. In der Auswertung des empirischen Materials, welches wir mithilfe der Grounded-Theory-Methodologie (GTM) realisierten, eröffnen wir Einblicke in technologisch vermittelte kommunikative Prozesse und arbeiten die (inter-)subjektive(n) Bedeutsamkeit(en) solcher Apps heraus.

En este artículo se tratará de revelar una de las estrategias que se despliegan en la reproducción de la masculinidad en tanto hegemonía, esto es, el rechazo de lo femenino proyectado como emasculación. La información ha sido recogida directamente de los perfiles de Grindr --aplicación (app) para establecer contacto entre hombres-- en puntos céntricos de tres ciudades: dos hispanohablantes (Ciudad de México y Madrid) y otra anglófona (Londres). A través de la comparación de mensajes en estos tres lugares se explora cómo el fenómeno del rechazo de la feminidad en varones —en este caso homosexuales y bisexuales mayoritariamente— se presenta con carácter transversal en las sociedades patriarcales.