Assistant Professor Dr. Janelle Ward and PhD candidate Shangwei Wu recently published a review on gay dating app studies in Sociology Compass. Major themes such as gay men’s online self-presentation and interactions, gay community in the digital era and gay men’s interpersonal relationships are discussed.
The article is a thematic review of gay dating app studies and explains how dating apps reform social relations among gay men. In this review - within a relatively new field in academic research - Ward and Wu adopt the mediation framework, which explains how communication technologies and society mutually shape each other.
The review focuses on dating apps as products, the ways gay men use these apps, and the social relations among gay men. The article describes how dating websites and social networking sites are not at all the same as dating apps. It is concluded that future research should pay more attention to the technical development of dating devices and to how such apps transform gay men’s social relations.
The full article can be accessed via the Wiley Online Library.