Abstract
It is well established that digital technology and code mediate bodies in space. The collapse of any supposed physical/digital divide has been amply documented to the extent that everyday life is now widely theorised in terms of hybridisation. What is less clear is what comes next for those participating in this hybridisation. This article examines what Kitchin and Dodge term the ‘social contour of software’ via queer male locative media users who collectively negotiate digital hybridisation in their everyday lives. Using qualitative interviews with 36 non-heterosexual men using apps such as Grindr and Tinder in London, UK, I explore how locative media refigures conceptualisations of community, technological efficiency and boundaries between private and public space. The study finds that users express ambivalence about their membership of queer ‘communities’, and are also unconvinced by online sociality. Apps expedite searches for new partners but prove deceptively time-consuming. Public and private space are being hybridised by locative technology, but common codes of conduct are slower to develop, leaving users unsure of how to navigate physical encounter. This article concludes that schema for queer men’s lives are increasingly promulgated digitally but may be uneasily embodied in everyday practice.
Highlights
Hybridization is an increasingly popular way of thinking about the multiple, simultaneous and interconnected dimensions of spaces and practices
This study has highlighted several ways that subjects incorporate the social contour of hybridised digital environments into daily life
Rather than just providing a ‘new layer of virtual sites superimposed over geographic spaces’ (Kitchin 1998, 403), hybridisation of virtual and embodied domains expedites new encounters for non-heterosexual men using locative apps
Summary
Hybridization is an increasingly popular way of thinking about the multiple, simultaneous and interconnected dimensions of spaces and practices. New developments in technology are making hybridity a key feature of contemporary culture, in particular how our identities and behaviour are produced online. Scholarship has progressed from thinking of virtual space as something distinct from the real world to more hybrid relations between individuals and their surroundings whilst online (Brubaker, Ananny, and Crawford 2014; Kitchin and Dodge 2011; McGlotten 2013). One way to interrogate this digital-physical relationship in a phenomenological, embodied context is through male-male dating and hook-up apps. Locative media – GPS-enabled apps downloaded onto mobile devices – dominate online socialisation for male-male encounter. A host of popular male-male apps specialise in body type, geographical area, or fetish. The major attraction of these platforms is their mapping function, which locates a user’s physical coordinates in order to sort potential matches by proximity, with the aim of expediting localised encounter
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