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Rape culture, described as when “violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent” (Buchwald, Fletcher, & Roth, 1993, p. vii), exists online and offline (Henry & Powell, 2014). Much of the research on rape culture focuses on the experiences of heterosexual women, and few studies have explored rape culture in the context of dating apps. This chapter explores how men who have sex with men (MSM) understand and experience rape culture through their use of Grindr and similar dating apps. A thematic analysis of interviews with 25 MSM dating app users revealed problematic user behavior as well as unwanted sexual messages and images as common manifestations of rape culture on dating apps. Participants explained that rape culture extends beyond in-app interactions to in-person encounters, as evident by incidents of sexual violence that several participants had experienced and one participant had committed. Participants were unsure about the extent to which MSM dating apps facilitate rape culture but asserted that some apps enable rape culture more than others. This chapter demonstrates the importance of investigating sexual violence against people of diverse gender and sexual identities to ensure their experiences are not minimized, ignored, or rendered invisible.

Mobile dating apps are widely used in the queer community. Whether for sexual exploration or dating, mobile and geosocial dating apps facilitate connection. But they also bring attendant privacy risks. This chapter is based on original research about the ways gay and bisexual men navigate their privacy on geosocial dating apps geared toward the LGBTQI community. It argues that, contrary to the conventional wisdom that people who share semi-nude or nude photos do not care about their privacy, gay and bisexual users of geosocial dating apps care very much about their privacy and engage in complex, overlapping privacy navigation techniques when sharing photos. They share semi-nude and nude photos for a variety of reasons, but generally do so only after building organic trust with another person. Because trust can easily break down without supportive institutions, this chapter argues that law and design must help individuals protect their privacy on geosocial dating apps.

This commentary puts forth a conceptual framework, referred to as the consumer, organization, government framework of unintended digital technology service failures, that specifies consumer, organizational and governmental shortcomings that result in digital technologies failing in terms of negatively affecting consumer, communal, national and/or global welfare.

The authors conceptualize an original framework by engaging in a literature review regarding marketplace failures associated with digital service technologies.

The framework shows that three drivers explain why commercial digital technologies often fail. The first driver highlights misuse or criminal intent from individuals. The second involves organizations failing to prevent or to address technology failures. The third pertains to failures that stem from governmental institutions.

The authors encourage researchers to build on their framework by putting forth research questions. To prevent or lessen opportunities for digital technologies to result in service failures, the authors also offer practitioners a “digital technology service failure audit.” This audit shows how digital technology creators and managers can anticipate and address consumer, organizational and governmental factors that often cause digital service technologies failures.

Despite the absence of industry-specific regulations and the existence of some regulatory immunities, digital technology providers have an ethical duty, and may be obligated under applicable tort law principles, to take steps to prevent unintended harm to consumers before launching their service technologies.

This work reveals that digital technologies represent new and different threats to vulnerable consumers, who often rely on, but do not fully understand, these technologies in their everyday living. The framework helps consumers, organizations and government agencies to identify and remedy current and potential instances of harmful digital technologies.

The purpose of this paper is to report novel information about the use of gay apps by the patrons of an exclusively gay resort in Queensland, Australia. This novel research environment facilitates an understanding of the embeddedness of gay dating apps within contemporary gay culture and community and the spatial reorientation that comes alongside the juxtaposition of physical and digital geographies.

An ethnographic study was conducted at the resort, and qualitative data presented here are drawn from semi-structured interviews with 27 gay-identifying male patrons of the resort. Critical ethnography provided beneficial access to situated perspectives and realities.

These data indicate that gay apps remain a pervasive way of making connections, even in an environment where common homosexuality is a reasonable expectation and where open self-expression is permitted and even encouraged. This complicates assumptions that gay apps’ emergence was in response to a need for privacy or anonymity for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in wider, straight society.

This paper reports the results of an ethnographic survey conducted in a highly novel research environment and particularly seeks to address divergent experiences of social and cultural change by LGBT people, including generational divides. It has value in demonstrating clear differences, ambiguities and mixed implications of gay apps and their relationship with changing LGBT spaces.

This chapter explores the ethical complexities of researching location-aware social discovery Smartphone applications (apps) and how they mediate contemporary experiences of travel. We highlight the context-specific approach required to carrying out research on Tinder, a location-aware app that enables people to connect with others in close proximity to them. By journeying through the early stages of our research project, we demonstrate how ethical considerations and dilemmas began long before our project became a project. We discuss the pulls toward data extraction/mining of user-generated content (i.e., Tinder user profiles) within digital social research and the ethical challenges of using this data for research purposes. We focus particularly on issues of informed consent, privacy, and copyright, and the differences between manual and automated data mining/extraction techniques. Excerpts from our university ethics application are included to demonstrate how our research sits uneasily within standardized ethical protocols. Our moves away from a ‘big data’ approach to more ‘traditional’ and participatory methodologies are located within questions of epistemology and ontology including our commitment to practicing a feminist research ethic. Our chapter concludes with the lessons learned in the aim to push forward with research in challenging online spaces and with new data sources.

This paper aims to define the term “socially unacceptable services” and call for novel research in these under-researched service industries.

Personal reflections.

Service offerings exist that, despite their ability to create value for customers, clients or partners, many in society at large deem to be offensive, inappropriate or harmful for a variety of reasons. Service researchers have ignored the existence and impact of socially unacceptable services on consumers and society for too long.

Given the expanding role of the transformative service research (TSR) paradigm in the services marketing domain, especially given its emphasis on exchanges that influence consumer and societal well-being and the reality that many socially unacceptable services profoundly influence consumer and societal welfare in both positive and negative manners, the time is opportune for service researchers to begin exploring socially unacceptable services from a TSR perspective.

Given that buyers and sellers who enter socially unacceptable exchanges often seem satisfied by doing so, the authors encourage researchers to unearth how consumers obtain value from these exchanges and to explore whether consumers enter these exchanges with full information to make informed decisions.

This viewpoint is one of the first to provide authors with an impetus to begin research program in socially unacceptable services and offers researchers a list of potential research topics in this new area. The authors believe that socially unacceptable service research may emerge as a separate research paradigm.

In recent years, the use of dating and hook up apps has become an increasingly socially acceptable and commonly used method of seeking romantic and sexual partners. This has seen a corresponding rise in media and crime reports of sexual harms facilitated through these services, including sexual harassment, unsolicited sexual imagery, and sexual assault. Emerging empirical research shows that experiences of sexual harms in this context are common and predominantly impact women and girls. The aim of this chapter is to examine the sociocultural and sexual norms that underpin online dating and which perpetuate a “rape culture” within which sexual harms become both possible and normalized. This chapter also considers how the discourses that minimize and legitimize sexual harms are encoded within the responses undertaken by dating and hook up apps to sexual harms. It is argued that together these norms and discourses may act to facilitate and/or prevent sexual harms, and may normalize and excuse these harms when they occur.

Sex tourism is well documented in the literature, but what about porn tourism? Whether it is a Ping Pong show in Phuket or the Banana show in Amsterdam, porn and tourism have an encounter and gaze no different from the Mona Lisa in the Louvre or magnificent views of New Zealand’s Southern Alps. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper explores the intersections of tourism, porn and the future as a conceptual framework.

Four intersections are derived from the conceptual framework. Intersection 1, the Future of Tourism, portrays the evolution of tourism and explores its technological future. Interaction 2, Porn in Tourism, distinguishes between soft- and hard-core porn tourism. Intersection 3, Portraying Porn as a Future Dimension, delves into futurism, science fiction and fantasy. The fourth intersection, the Future Gaze, conveys the thrust of the paper by exploring how technological advancement blends with authenticity and reality. Thus the porn tourist seeks both the visual and the visceral pleasures of desire. The paper concludes with four future gazes of porn tourism, The Allure of Porn, The Porn Bubble, Porn as Liminal Experience and Hardcore.

The originality of this paper is that this is the first paper to systematically examine porn tourism beyond sex tourism overlaying with a futures dimension. Porn tourists actively seek to experience both visual and visceral pleasures. Tourism and pornography both begin with the gaze. The gaze is an integral component of futures thinking. Technology is changing us, making us smarter, driving our thirst for liminal experiences. Like the transition from silent movies to talking pictures the porn tourism experience of the future is likely to involve more of the bodily senses.