GCST1603
Gender and Screen Culture:
From Film to Apps
WEEK 11, 2021
We will start at 12.05pm, to give people time to arrive.
The overheads are available as a pdf download on the Week 11 Canvas page.
To maximise access for everyone – in lectures please have your video and
audio off to begin. There will be plenty of opportunities to interact, and if you
want to ask a question you can turn your own audio/microphone on.
In tutorials, we will ask you to please have both audio and video on if you can.
Today
Lifestyle Apps and the Body
• Digital Selves
• Embodiment and Virtuality
• Lifestyle Apps: MyFitnessPal; Flo
• The Convergent Self: AppleWatch
Dating Apps and Digital Intimacy
• Legacy Modes of Digital Dating: EHarmony; ThePinkSofa
• Digital Intimacy
• Dating Apps: Tinder; Grindr
• “App Culture”: Bumble; Hinge
GCST1603 Screen Cultures and Gender: From Film to Apps,
Week 11
Poll!
Lifestyle Apps and the Body
• Digital Selves
• Embodiment and Virtuality
• Lifestyle Apps: MyFitnessPal; Flo
• The Convergent Self: AppleWatch
Dating Apps and Digital Intimacy
• Legacy Modes of Digital Dating: EHarmony; ThePinkSofa
• Digital Intimacy
• Dating Apps: Tinder; Grindr
• “App Culture”: Bumble; Hinge
GCST1603 Screen Cultures and Gender: From Film to Apps,
Week 11
Digital Selves
• Profiles
• Cf. “media convergence”
• Mediated sociality and lifestyle
What do we mean by lifestyle?
• Way of living.
• Set of habits, attitudes, possessions.
• Interests, opinions, behaviours and orientations.
• How people cope with their physical, psychological, social and
economic environments on a daily basis.
• Work and leisure patterns as well as activities, attitudes,
interests, opinions, values, spending habits.
• Also reflective of self-image, self-concept or how people want to
and believe they are seen by others.
• A composite of culturally located motivations, needs and wants.
GCST1603 Screen Cultures and Gender: From Film to Apps,
Week 11
Lifestyle Apps:
MyFitness Pal
• The first “smartphones”
• IBM’s Simon Personal Communicator 1992
• Term coined 1995
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone
• From business to “lifestyle”
• The fitness tracker explosion
• MyFitnessPal – first released 2005
• FitBit – first released 2009
• FitBit (2014)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0qVi_nF6y8
• Parody (2016)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muydB2yE0bA
GCST1603 Screen Cultures and Gender: From Film to Apps,
Week 11
“lifestyle apps”:
Embodiment and
Virtuality
“Push responsibilisation”
“empowerment-through self-improvement is a rhetorical
force behind the spread of interactive technologies... this
research reveals the vast scope of the “health and fitness”
construct: apps pertain, among other issues, to well defined
medical conditions such as diabetes, to “lifestyle” issues such
as sodium intake, to leisure activities such as exercise. These
matters crystallize around the body, to be sure, but also
around the purported need for personal intervention. And so
technological development finds suitable justification”
(Sophia Johnson, “‘Maternal Devices’, Social Media and
the Self-Management of Pregnancy, Mothering and
Child Health” Societies 2014).
Images and rhetorics of personal control
GCST1603 Screen Cultures and Gender: From Film to Apps,
Week 11
“lifestyle apps”:
Embodiment and
Virtuality
“The recent proliferation of wearable self-tracking devices intended to
regulate and measure the body has brought contingent questions of
controlling, accessing and interpreting personal data. Given a socio-
technical context in which individuals are no longer the most authoritative
source on data about themselves, wearable self-tracking technologies
reflect the simultaneous commodification and knowledge-making that
occurs between data and bodies. In this article, we look specifically at
wearable, self-tracking devices in order to set up an analytical comparison
with a key historical predecessor, the weight scale. By taking two distinct
cases of self-tracking – wearables and the weight scale – we can situate
current discourses of big data within a historical framing of self-
measurement and human subjectivity. While the advertising promises of
both the weight scale and the wearable device emphasize self-knowledge
and control through external measurement, the use of wearable data by
multiple agents and institutions results in a lack of control over data by
the user. In the production of self-knowledge, the wearable device is also
making the user known to others, in a range of ways that can be both
skewed and inaccurate.”
(Kate Crawford et al., “Our metrics, ourselves: A hundred years of self-
tracking from the weight scale to the wrist wearable device”, 2015)
Lifestyle Apps: Flo
Not just fitness
• MoodTracker; Happiness; Beyond Blue Check-In App
• Flo
Lifestyle Apps: Flo
Not just fitness
• MoodTracker
• Flo
• Track your health
beyond periods.
• #1 female OB-GYN-
recommended app for
period and cycle
tracking
• “Secret chats is a safe
space where you can
discuss intimate topics,
ask questions and get
support from like-
minded others”
The Convergent Self:
AppleWatch
• The networked self
• Quantified selves
• Techno-gaze – “Monitoring and tracking
technologies create a “techno-gaze” that can be
directed towards the user: measuring devices offer
insights into personal data flows by making them
comprehensible and actionable in terms of
individual and biopolitical aims” (Ruckenstein,
2014).
• “Prosthetic surveillance” (Rich & Miah, 2009).
• ‘Everywear’ – “a way to understand the increasing
prevalence of technologies that are worn or in
some way tethered to the body” (Gilmore, 2015).
GCST1603 Screen Cultures and Gender: From Film to Apps,
Week 11
THIS IS A SCHEDULED 5
MIN PAUSE…
• Do you want to ask a question – raise your
hand in the reaction section or type your
question in the chat!
• Are there notes you want to make now, or
maybe there’s something you want to look
up?
• Perhaps you just need a break?
GCST1603 Screen Cultures and Gender: From Film to Apps,
Week 11
Poll!
• Do you want to ask a question – raise your
hand in the reaction section or type your
question in the chat!
• Are there notes you want to make now, or
maybe there’s something you want to look
up?
• Perhaps you just need a break?
GCST1603 Screen Cultures and Gender: From Film to Apps,
Week 11
Legacy Modes of
Digital Dating:
EHarmony
Eharmony – first launched 2000
• The profiles
• Mediated sociality and lifestyle
• “Digital communication technologies are
contributing to new ideas and experiences
of intimacy, friendship and identity through
new forms of social interaction and new
techniques of public display, particularly on
social network sites” (Chambers, 2012)
Legacy Modes of
Digital Dating:
EHarmony
Legacy Modes of
Dating
• “Lonely Hearts” – aka “personal ads” in news media
GCST1603 Screen Cultures and Gender: From Film to Apps,
Week 11
Legacy Modes of
Dating
• “Lonely Hearts” – aka “personal ads” in news media
Legacy Modes of
Dating
• “Lonely Hearts” – aka “personal ads” in news media
19th century acquaintance/invitation/escort card
Legacy Modes of
Dating
• “Lonely Hearts” – aka “personal ads” in news media
Dating chat lines
Legacy Modes of
Digital Dating:
ThePinkSofa
• The Pink Sofa – founded 1999
• “a relatively new set of cultural practices and activities
that are specific gay sexual culture and that involve certain
sociotechnical and material arrangements, namely WiFI,
3G and the devices that make use of these capacities to
facilitate sexual and social encounters between men
(‘online hook-up devices’). I locate these devices as a
relatively new infrastructure of the sexual encounter, by
which I mean to draw attention to their material specificity
and also make the point that they mediate the sexual
encounter in new ways: making certain activities,
relations, and practices possible while obviating others.”
(Kane Race, “‘Party ‘n’ Play’: Online hook-up devices and
the emergence of PNP practices among gay men” 2015)
GCST1603 Screen Cultures and Gender: From Film to Apps,
Week 11
Legacy Modes of
Digital Dating:
ThePinkSofa
• The Pink Sofa – founded 1999
• “In other words, online hook-up devices are not inert
vessels or pathways for the same old meanings and
interactions. They are not intermediaries; merely
reproducing pre-existent characteristics of sexual
cultures and practices. Rather, they act as mediators:
that is, material actants that modify the practices and
encounters they enable in quite specific, potentially
impactful ways” (Kane Race, “‘Party ‘n’ Play’: Online
hook-up devices and the emergence of PNP practices
among gay men” 2015)
GCST1603 Screen Cultures and Gender: From Film to Apps,
Week 11
Digital Sex/Intimacy
GCST1603 Screen Cultures and Gender: From Film to Apps,
Week 11
Dating Apps: Tinder;
Grindr
“Technology is Society Made
Durable” (Bruno Latour, The
Sociological Review, 1990
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/a
bs/10.1111/j.1467-
954X.1990.tb03350.x)
Dating Apps: Tinder;
Grindr
Not just apps but devices:
• Dense nodes of material-semiotic-erotic investment
• Signifying devices with technical and performative
agency
• Constituting a new infrastructure of intimacy/the
sexual encounter
Generationalisation
• ABC investigative report on Tinder (with warning for
whole episode, though not the clip I will show)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFFTMfp5iQo
GCST1603 Screen Cultures and Gender: From Film to Apps,
Week 11
“App Culture”:
Bumble; Hinge
• “Love has truly digitised” (Carlson, 2019)
• “For almost 60% of Australians, mobile dating
applications, particularly Tinder and Grindr, have
become the primary avenue to love, intimacy and sexual
pleasure (Relationships Australia, 2017).” (Carlson, 2020)
Fear of digital intimacy!
• “People don’t talk to each other anymore”
• “Young people are addicted to their phones”
• “Remember handwritten letters?”
• “Romance is dead”
• “We are all going to date robots”
“App Culture”:
Bumble; Hinge
• “Love has truly digitised” (Carlson, 2019)
• “For almost 60% of Australians, mobile dating
applications, particularly Tinder and Grindr, have
become the primary avenue to love, intimacy and sexual
pleasure (Relationships Australia, 2017).” (Carlson, 2020)
“App Culture”:
Bumble; Hinge
• “Love has truly digitised” (Carlson, 2019)
• “For almost 60% of Australians, mobile dating
applications, particularly Tinder and Grindr, have
become the primary avenue to love, intimacy and sexual
pleasure (Relationships Australia, 2017).” (Carlson, 2020)
Risk (Carlson)
• “But many concerns have also been raised about their
potential to cause great harm.”
• “They are implicated in the perpetuation of normative
ideas of gender, race and sexuality;
• and there have been widespread concerns about the
physical safety of users, particularly women and sexually
diverse users…”
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ0Sa3Z66fA&ab
_channel=BuzzFeedVideo