Suchergebnisse

Location-based social apps leverage mobile phones to provide face-to-face (FtF) social opportunities for physically proximate individuals, such as finding nearby people to socialize, date, or hook up. Prior work on dating and hookup apps has focused mostly on profiles and user goals, but this leaves open important questions of how, after constructing a profile, people use these apps to connect and realize their goals, and what these experiences are like. We report on 22 interviews with users of Grindr, a location-based social app for men who have sex with men. We examine interaction processes from viewing profiles to meeting up. Using the perspective of relational dialectics, we explore tensions around connecting with others, sharing information, and being predictable or novel. We find that profile presentations are flexible and subject to change, disinhibition challenges interaction and revealing goals, and social consequences increase through moving from profile browsing to meeting FtF.

While online spaces and communities were once seen to transcend geography, the ubiquity of location-aware mobile devices means that today's online interactions are deeply intertwined with offline places and relationships. Systems such as online dating applications for meeting nearby others provide novel social opportunities, but can also complicate interaction by aggregating or "co-situating" diverse sets of individuals. Often this aggregation occurs across traditional spatial or community boundaries that serve as cues for self-presentation and impression formation. This paper explores these issues through an interview study of Grindr users. Grindr is a location-aware real-time dating application for men who have sex with men. We argue that co-situation affects how and whether Grindr users and their behavior are visible to others, collapses or erases contextual cues about normative behavior, and introduces tensions in users' self-presentation in terms of their identifiability and the cues their profile contains relative to their behavior.

We analyze organizational regeneration using case materials from a study of a children's summer camp. Each year members of various types of seasonal organizations, such as summer camps and ski areas, come together to bring these organizations "back to life" after many months of dormancy. Because many staff members are new and other conditions vary, the result of this regeneration process is necessarily different from the previous year's organization, but it is nonetheless recognizable to repeat clientele as a familiar instance of "the same" organization. We use this rarely examined process of regeneration to explore the question of how we can regard an organization as being the same entity over time. We suggest that this sameness stems from a coherence and similarity of actions at the organizational level that is analogous to the psychological notion of individual character. Just as individual habits cohere in the character of an individual and allow us to recognize and predict future behavior, we argue that organizations are systems of interacting dispositions to act in a particular way. It is the mutually adapted content of this ensemble of action dispositions that constitutes what we present here as organizational character. We argue that such an ensemble of dispositions is coherent, persistent, and necessary for seasonal regeneration. This work contributes to an ongoing discussion of organizational action and similarity over time. Our focus on regenerative processes in a seasonal organization provides a distinct and informative perspective on these issues.