GAY DATA : A DISSERTATION in Communication Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

298 Pages·2016·7.873 MB·English

by  Yoel Roth

GAY DATA
Yoel Roth
A DISSERTATION
in
Communication
Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania
in
Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
2016

Supervisor of Dissertation:

________________________________
Sharrona Pearl, Assistant Professor of Communication

Graduate Group Chairperson:

________________________________
Joseph Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication

Dissertation Committee:
John Jackson, Jr., Richard Perry University Professor
Joseph Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication
GAY DATA
COPYRIGHT
2016
Yoel Roth

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As the youngest of three siblings, I’ve always been able to follow in the impressive
footsteps of my two older sisters. In high school, a physics teacher who had all three Roth
children in his classes reacted to seeing my name on his roster by saying, “You’ve got
some awfully big shoes to fill.” Many years and countless hours of research later, this
dissertation is the product of my continuing attempt to fill those shoes. First and
foremost, my thanks go to Maayan and Nitzan, the best sisters anyone could ever ask for.
Without your love, advice, commiseration, and persistent reminders to just finish writing
my dissertation already, this would never have been possible.
Over the last four years, my advisor, Sharrona Pearl, has helped me cultivate my
interests and curiosities into meaningful research. Her friendship and mentorship have
made me a better researcher and teacher, and I’ll forever be grateful for the time and
effort she’s invested in me. Joseph Turow and John Jackson have likewise nurtured this
project and my interests, and I’m indebted to them for their questions, advice, and
urgings to work outside of my comfort zone. I’ve also had the privilege of working with
and learning from faculty outside my committee; many, many thanks to Carolyn Marvin,
José van Dijck, Lance Wahlert, and Barbie Zelizer.
My decision to go to graduate school in the first place was shaped by the
tremendous teachers I’ve had over the years. As an undergraduate, I was lucky enough to
work with Simon Head, Paula Heinonen, Carol Nackenoff, Bob Rehak, Dominic Tierney,
and Patty White. I’d also like to thank Litty Paxton for her mentorship in the art of
teaching and managing an undergraduate class. Their dedication to undergraduate
ii i
learning, and the enthusiasm they bring to working with their students, has been an
incredible inspiration.
At the Annenberg School for Communication, I’ve benefitted from a community
of incredibly bright and engaged peers, whose ideas are present throughout this work. My
thanks to Doug Allen, Chris Cimaglio, David Conrad, Nick Gilewicz, Corrina Laughlin,
Deb Lui, Shane Mannis, Sara Mourad, Alexandra Sastre, and Aaron Shapiro for their
support and friendship. The mentorship of Nora Draper has shaped this project and my
own development as an academic in more ways than I can count; I owe her my immense
gratitude for taking me under her wing. And, of course, my time at Annenberg wouldn’t
have been complete without my officemates Bo Mai and Sun-Ha Hong, whose
companionship and conversation have made our office a truly special place to work.
To the many friends whose reflections on gay social networking apps I’ve
shamelessly cribbed in this discussion: I hope I’ve done justice to your thoughts. Special
thanks to Jane Abell, Jonathan Cowperthwait, Isaac Hock, Carter Green, Chris Kennedy,
Ambar LaForgia, Arthur Nicholls, Laurie Voss, Shawn Walker, Kate Walton, and Natalie
Zeldin. I’m grateful to all of you for being a part of my life.
Around the time that I first started researching gay social networking apps, I met
someone on Scruff who would turn out to be both a source of academic inspiration and
my co-pilot along the way. Nick Madsen has been a sounding board for my ideas,
anxieties, frustrations, and excitements over the years, and has been patient and
compassionate throughout even the darkest moments of this process. Thank you.
Last, but certainly not least, I’ve been unbelievably fortunate to have the
unwavering support of my parents. Your pride in my accomplishments and your much-
iv
needed nudges to get my work done have kept me going over the last four years. Despite
my trepidation about having my parents read a manuscript that’s in no small part about
gay sex, I can’t wait to share this with you.
v
ABSTRACT
GAY DATA
Yoel Roth
Sharrona Pearl
Since its launch in 2009, the geosocial networking service Grindr has become an
increasingly mainstream and prominent part of gay culture, both in the United States and
globally. Mobile applications like Grindr give users the ability to quickly and easily share
information about themselves (in the form of text, numbers, and pictures), and connect
with each other in real time on the basis of geographic proximity. I argue that these
services constitute an important site for examining how bodies, identities, and
communities are translated into data, as well as how data becomes a tool for forming,
understanding, and managing personal relationships. Throughout this work, I articulate a
model of networked interactivity that conceptualizes self-expression as an act determined
by three sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting sets of affordances and
constraints: (1) technocommercial structures of software and business; (2) cultural and
subcultural norms, mores, histories, and standards of acceptable and expected conduct;
and (3) sociopolitical tendencies that appear to be (but in fact are not) fixed
technocommercial structures. In these discussions, Grindr serves both as a model of
processes that apply to social networking more generally, as well as a particular study
into how networked interactivity is complicated by the histories and particularities of
Western gay culture. Over the course of this dissertation, I suggest ways in which users,
policymakers, and developers can productively recognize the liveness, vitality, and
durability of personal information in the design, implementation, and use of gay-targeted
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social networking services. Specifically, I argue that through a focus on (1) open-ended
structures of interface design, (2) clear and transparent articulations of service policies,
and the rationales behind them, and (3) approaches to user information that promote data
sovereignty, designers, developers, and advocates can work to make social networking
services, including Grindr, safer and more representative of their users throughout their
data’s lifecycle.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract vi
Table of Contents viii
List of Illustrations ix
Introduction, Literature Review, and Methods 1
Data 12
Gay 35
Method 48
Birth 70
The infrastructural layer 73
The personal layer 83
The social-spatial layer 98
Conclusions: Asymptotically approaching embodiment 108
Life 114
Objectionable, indecent, and pornographic 118
Normative platforms 130
Negotiating gay visibility 133
Expressive resistance 139
Conclusions: The least restrictive alternative? 144
Afterlife 149
Data’s risky afterlife 157
Platform and context specific data flows: A model 162
Commercial afterlives 165
No fats, no femmes, no privacy? 185
Conclusions: Making sense of revenge porn 216
Conclusion 221
Coda: Death? 233
Symbolic death 235
Real death 244
Works cited 254

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1: Grindr profile creation screen 88
Figure 2: Completed Grindr profile 95
Figure 3: Grindr Cascade 101
Figure 4: Filters for Grindr Cascade 103
Figure 5: Grindr content review placeholder image 123
Figure 6: Scruff content policy notices 126
Figure 7: Public view of “Wanna Play?” installation 149
Figure 8: Alternate public view of “Wanna Play?” installation 152
Figure 9: Data flow model 163
Figure 10: Marketing on Grindr promotion 179
Figure 11: Recent tags cloud from Douchebags of Grindr 198
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION, LITERATURE REVIEW, AND METHODS
Gay social media is moving out of the margins and into the popular spotlight. Since its
launch in 2009, the geosocial1 networking application Grindr has garnered consistent
attention in the mainstream press. Vanity Fair referred to Grindr as “the world’s biggest,
scariest gay bar” (Kapp, 2011). One of the earliest mainstream stories about the app,
published in The Guardian in 2010, stated, unequivocally, that Grindr “is reconfiguring
the landscape of human relationships” (Vernon, 2010) — a lofty achievement for any
smartphone application, much less one that had been on the market for less than a year. In
a recent feature about the app published in The New York Times, the author confirmed
Grindr’s status as “the killer networking app in gay social media” — noting that the
service has inspired droves of imitators, seemingly boundless criticism from users and
pundits alike, and continued, exuberant engagement by millions of users worldwide
(Trebay, 2014). And, just days before the 2015 Super Bowl, Grindr competitor Scruff
bought a 48-foot billboard in the University of Phoenix Stadium parking lot, portraying
two men in a locker room with the caption, “Play on our team” — a marketing move that
garnered national headlines and, according to a spokesperson for the service, resulted in a
20 percent increase in profile creations in the Phoenix area (Mosendz, 2015).
As services like Grindr and Scruff become increasingly popular and pervasive —
as the glow of smartphone screens becomes a phenomenological mainstay of gay bars,
and of gay life more generally — we’re faced with the task of unpacking the

1 Geosocial media are social networking services or platforms that use geolocation data (such as GPS
coordinates) to connect users with each other on the basis of geographic proximity.
1