Digital Intimacies: how gay and bisexual men use smartphones to negotiate their cultures of intimacy

Since smartphones became widely available in 2007 both media, communications & cultural studies and public health academics have been researching how gay and bisexual men use them to negotiate their cultures of intimacy. This research has tended to focus on how these men use 'hook-up' applications, such as Grindr and Scruff, to organise casual sex encounters, particularly in relation to safer sex negotiation.

In doing so, much of this research has enriched our understanding of gay and bisexual men's casual sex practices; informed HIV prevention strategies; and begun to shed light on the role of digital media in both of these related contexts.

However, by focusing on hook-up apps, this research has so far overlooked some important issues that relate to smartphone use and intimacy amongst these men. Gay and bisexual men do not only use hook-up apps to negotiate their intimate lives, which are not exclusively defined by casual sex; they frequently migrate between different aspects of their smartphones (e.g. the phone itself, the camera, other social media applications) to practice different sorts of intimacy (e.g. monogamous relationships, open relationships, one off sexual encounters, on-going casual sex partners, infidelities).

Researching these practices will have implications not only for popular understandings of gay and bisexual male intimacy (which are often over-determined by casual sex), but also for how effectively the public health sector can provide services that improve the overall health and wellbeing of these men beyond HIV prevention.

The existing research also has a tendency to decontextualize this smartphone use, not fully accounting for the wider socio-cultural conditions in which this use takes place. Gay and bisexual men use smartphones to negotiate intimacy in socio-cultural contexts in which not only ideas and attitudes towards gay and bisexual men are changing (e.g. the legalization of gay marriage, liberalization of more general attitudes to gay and bisexual men) but the material conditions in which they practice intimacy are changing too (e.g. changes in gay nightlife; changes in HIV prevention and treatment; and constantly updating smartphone and internet technologies).

This project begins from the cultural studies perspective that media use cannot be adequately made sense of outside of the cultures in which this use takes place. It therefore aims to understand the various ways that gay and bisexual men use different aspects of their smartphones to negotiate different sorts of intimacies within these constantly shifting socio-cultural conditions.

It will do this by deploying an interdisciplinary team of researchers with backgrounds in public health and media and cultural studies and by working closely with the project's partners - Terrence Higgins Trust, London Friend and Waverley Care - all key third sector organisations working with gay and bisexual men. Drawing on these various expertise, this project will use an innovative mixed method approach that combines cultural analysis with qualitative methods.

The qualitative methods will be interviews and focus groups with 40 men from two different locations in the UK - London and both rural and urban parts of Eastern Scotland. This dual sited approach is designed to capture place-based cultural differences in smartphone use amongst this group. The cultural analysis will look at a wide range of documents that will help map the context for this smartphone use, from, for example, media representations to policy documents.

The project will form its conclusions by performing a cross-case analysis across the data sets - providing a rich and nuanced picture of this sort of smartphone use in relation to the wider socio-cultural conditions in which it takes place.