The problem of technological integration and geosocial cruising in Seoul

Geosociality

The collection and use of data on a person’s physical location in the world seem to alter any perception of the online as a separable space. The host of applications making explicit use of data for social communication seems tied to the physical world in ways that are difficult to conceptualise. Additionally, the rise of geosocial software has coincided with the expectation that identity should be singular and verified on many social networks. All in all, the development of these affordances implies a new frontier for digital anthropology. However, turning to integration as a neutral theory or methodology does not fit my research well. Here, I am interested in a subset of geosocial networking technologies.

As locative software was made available to the public in the late 2000s, applications were released that enabled men to meet other men for sex. First was Grindr, released less than a year after the first iPhone was launched in 2009 (Woo, 2013). A few months later, a similar application was released in the United States called Jack’d (2010). Both apps are similarly structured. Users arrive on a grid filled with profiles, four per row. Moving left to right, then downwards, indicates physical distance from the user’s location. Clicking on an image opens a profile, which is often basic, providing sometimes information on the user’s desires, location or in Korea a set of biological credentials (height/weight/penis size). Grindr allowed only one picture and Jack’d up to four, with two ‘private photos’. Naked public images are banned, but many pushed against this prohibition. If a user wanted to make contact they could open a conversation box where explicit photographs could be shared. Korean men said that Jack’d was more popular than Grindr, a statement corroborated by ‘distance tests’ conducted each day in different parts of Seoul. Users can only scroll through a set number of profiles before reaching a limit, where a short distance indicated on the final users visible meant a high density. There are too many aspects of Koreans’ use of these applications to cover in this article: the use of slang, the addition of external websites and the hopes invested in the network. Here, I limit myself to a discussion of how Korean men compared the type of social connection available on applications and in saunas. First, I consider an emerging academic conversation around geosocial cruising.

Hjorth (2012) echoes the integration hypothesis, suggesting that geosociality creates hybrid space, blurring the virtual and actual. However, most emerging studies of geosocial cruising do not comment directly on these debates, but emulate the discussion in considering the impact of applications on physical space and social relations. For Batiste (2013), applications allow gay men to interact outside the physicality of the gay scene, providing users a ‘queer cartography’, revealing the population of queer men in a given urban space. Similarly, Dang et al. (2013) argue that the use of applications in Macau results in an imagination of membership in a wider collectivity of gay men. The dominant interpretation is that applications integrate men into a network, where they no longer have to go to specific physical spaces to meet men for sex. Instead, everywhere is potentially queer.

Race (2015) adds analytical detail to these interpretations in suggesting that ‘these devices produce a novel experience of social space oriented towards the production of homosexual encounters’ (p. 498). He compares applications to older physical cruising sites, which he argues served as ‘framing devices’, isolating men’s sexual encounters from the rest of their lives. By contrast, applications create an easily accessible sexual public. Men are able to negotiate their intimate lives outside of ‘ghettoised’ physical space, creating ties with other men that can persist alongside everyday life – a redistribution of intimacy across a range of spaces, domestic and private. Here, integration or convergence is not neutral but positive. For Race, digital technologies are not simply reformulating the relationship between the online and offline, but animating gay men’s sexual publics in a novel way. The idea that applications are creating a newly agentive subcultural space has become dominant, and this both rephrases and transforms an interest of digital anthropology in integration.

Race is likely writing against Western discourses that treat applications as damaging or promiscuous. However, McGlotten (2013) has suggested that this positive reading of new technologies might be overoptimistic. He demonstrates that physical factors, such as age or race, can undermine men’s ability to realise offline sexual encounters. Older work on men’s sexuality and technology has equally questioned the desirability of a form of cruising based on an explicit relationship between the online and the physicality of appearance and body. Mowlabocus (2010) explores how certain men shun websites such as gaydar.com because they feel uncomfortable with both the degree of self-presentation demanded on profiles and engaging in the conversations required to arrange an encounter. Instead, he explores how young men use anonymous forums to organise semi-public encounters. Here, profiles are redundant and do not act as representations of a unified online–offline self, promoting, ‘activities which seem to have less investment in an attendant subjectivity’ (p. 128).

The implication is that there exist multiple options for cruising, some of which involve a lesser degree of self-presentation, and a different connection between the mediated and physical world. In the context of technologies that rely explicitly on self-presentation for success, whether written or visual, some men choose to eschew this form of connection in favour of anonymous sexual encounters. It is important to consider how alternative sites in this research function less as integrative technologies, pulling together an online–offline selfhood. For some men, these different affordances satisfy not only their longing for a different kind of sex, but their choice of medium is motivated by their desire against integration itself. Race implies that applications are providing a new form of agency that is superior to the physical spaces of the past, but as McGlotten and Mowlabocus make clear, the potential for integration might not be an unambiguous good.

Dark spaces in Seoul

I turn now to my research in Korea to further explore the problematic nature of integration. The ethnography presented comes from 14 months of research in Seoul from 2013 to 2014. I interviewed 75 men and spent time in physical spaces with many others. I employed a number of methods in researching geosocial cruising applications. Initially, I collected and categorised profile information, including pictures, before engaging in ongoing conversations with men online. I mapped the applications in different parts of the city, considering the density of users at different times of day, as well as variations in profiles and other self-presentations. The second stage was to engage in conversation with a range of men, online and in physical spaces. It was difficult to talk to men who wanted to maintain anonymous, but I relied heavily on offline interviews where informants could show me interactions on the applications. I also attended saunas, speaking mainly to managers rather than customers, but I was satisfied with being an observer alone, relying on focus groups and interviews to obtain detailed data (see Tewksbury, 2002). A number of close friends also collated their Grindr and Jack’d usage over a number of months in an online blog that they shared with me.

It is important to consider how geosocial cruising applications exist in relation to sexual opportunities, in both contemporary and historical context. Crucial to the current project is an understanding of how male–male sex has been organised in the physical landscape of Seoul. Homosexuality in Korea could not in the past be isolated as a quality of personhood distinct from gender roles. Nonetheless, since at least Seoul’s urbanisation Korean men have had access to dark places where they could purchase or otherwise engage in sex with other men. Park (2006) suggests that in pre-modern village life, semi-public sexual encounters were common between men of all classes and ages, but that colonial urbanisation and the rise of a commercialised sex industry resulted in a ‘privatisation’ of sexual interaction. The hidden quality of these encounters is important since it enabled many men to ‘solve’ (the Korean wording) the problem of their same-sex sexual desires unseen, while maintaining a normative form, often involving heterosexual marriage.

Scholars have highlighted the tacit quality of East Asian managements of same-sex sexuality, which is often distinguished against a confrontational tendency in Western sexual politics (Tan, 2011). Confucianism is often invoked to explain how people in the region often prioritise the maintenance of familial and public relationships above admissions of sexual desire. Ethnographically, scholars explore the range of techniques employed to compartmentalise or ‘bury’ sexual desires. Engebretsen (2013) argues that queer women in China may actively desire heterosexual marriage as a route to adult personhood that satisfies parental-child obligations. Others, most notably Chou (2000, 2001), write about a technique where men will introduce a partner to their parents while defining the relationship as either a friendship or a sibling relationship. Parents will often tolerate the relationship, even while they do not admit its sexual or romantic qualities. Cho (2009) speaks also of ‘contract marriages’, where same-sex desiring men and women will marry one another to fulfil parental and social obligations.

What unites these examples is the assertion of a different organisation of selfhood and self-other relations in the East Asian context. Pursuing a double life, where same-sex desire is either hidden or minimised in its ability to be known, allows men and women to negotiate sexual encounters while still fulfilling obligations, particularly to family. In my doctoral research (McGuire, 2016), I argue that a concrete limit has been reached in Korean society. In simple terms, there has emerged a problematisation of sexuality in recent years. This change is wide-reaching, involving not only the emergence of a politicised discourse around sexual respectability and morality but concrete transformations in technology and urban spaces. Most important to the current piece is the increased tempo of gentrification in Seoul’s premier gay scenes (Itaewon and Jongno), home to many of the biggest saunas and clubs of the city.

These transformations are complex, but it is important to note that many men who still desire a double life feel increasingly exposed and alienated by these changes, even while they are formative of new opportunities for male–male mutuality. A central problem is that the new clubs of Itaewon, and to a lesser degree Jongno, are seen as inappropriate places for cruising. These men told me that this change extended beyond the new clubs alone, and the scene as a whole was increasingly understood as uninhabitable. In the context of investment and development, the dark parts of the city are now inhabited with different sorts of populations, threatening the validity of the sauna as a business model and safe space. The men I take a particular interest in – those who desire a double life – tell me they are turning to geosocial cruising applications to mediate the undesirable transformations they experience in the landscape of the city. However, these applications offer a very different sense of connection to that of the sauna, leaving men with a new problem of how to maintain a double life in a hyper-connective technology that functions on an integration between the online and offline. For this reason, I compare here the connective potentialities of those spaces that allowed men to easily compartmentalise their desires, most notably the sauna, and these other new technologies.

The concept of bang (literally ‘room’) has been mobilised to explore Korean spatial and social organisation. As Choi et al. (2009) define it, ‘a bang is a typologically flexible, multifunctional space in which multitudes of individual and collective activities occur, obliterating the boundaries between social dichotomies such as work and leisure or public or private’. Bang exist in a number of forms: PC-bang are similar to Internet cafes, but most often centred explicitly around gaming; noraebang are karaoke rooms, jjimjilbangs combine baths, hostel, restaurant and living room, DVD-bangs provide TVs and multibang attempt to combine karaoke with games and other forms of entertainment. Other rooms for rent include study spaces, saunas and love motels. Chee (2006) argues that PC-bangs function as a place between home and work, providing an additional ‘third space’ that is neither public nor private. Both Hjorth (2012) and Choi and Greenfield (2009) suggest that what is specific about bangs is their status as flexible and shared spaces.

Hjorth (2007) notes that bangs have also been recreated online in the social networking system Cyworld mini-hompy. The site is focused around an individual mini room (mini-bang), which the user can decorate and invite friends to visit. Any visitor needs to be ‘friends’ with the user, but the term the site uses is ilchon. A chon is a unit of relational proximity, where each numerical value (il means one) indicates generational distance from ego. Ilchon equates then to something similar to ‘first connection’. Hjorth (2012) uses both bang and ilchon to describe the emerging socialities of location-based services in Seoul, where these are local variations on ‘place’ and ‘connection’. Choi and Greenfield (2009) also use the concept of bang to explain the ‘how Seoul is becoming integrated into a wider network of ubiquitous networked screens and bang’. However, if the term bang comes to represent a network then it loses its central meaning. While bang are seen as shared spaces for groups to socialise, this co-presence is premised on an insulation of the bang from the outside world.

One issue is the sanitisation of bangs in the above example. DVD-bang are perhaps the most transparently sexual. These were notorious in the 1990s as cheap hookup sites for students, and the streets around universities were filled with these establishments. Noraebang can be synonymous with prostitution, both hetero and homosexual. I met a number of young men who had been employed as ‘assistants’ and ‘singers’. As men, normally businessmen alone, entered the building they would choose an available man to join them in a private karaoke room. Even PC-bangs were known as places where some went to buy quick sexual services. The point is that these less salubrious versions of the bang make money out of providing a dark space for sex, mostly for men.

Alford (1999) suggests that freedom in Korea is still imagined in terms of darkness. Social connection in Korea is tightly bound, with little room for individual agency. For Koreans, the public rather than the private is radically freeing, providing temporary respite from the totality of social ties. What happens in dark corners of Seoul has no impact on family life: the public and private are in no way integrated. The success of bang is predicated on their ability to shut out all external social connection. Isolation is actively produced by managers, who exert labour in planning and maintaining privacy. Location is one aspect, bang providing sexual services are peripheral to main roads. Design also limits connection, with cashiers sequestered behind counters, where all they see of the customer is their hands pushing money through a slot. Corridors are dimly lit, and customers tend not to make eye contact as they ferry beer to their rooms. In short, the organisation of these spaces revolves around a lack of transparency or integration. ¹

I would argue that gay saunas provide men with a similar sense of isolation, even while the space within is often permeable. Customers move through a maze of rooms with beds or sleeping mats. It is important that the sauna is dark. There may be lights in the locker room, but other spaces are kept dark with blackout blinds. The darkness of saunas was justified as a product of Korean men’s shyness, but many opined that they liked it this way. Men I spoke to balked at the idea of a light sauna, suggesting they felt embarrassed at the prospect. The customer pays for entrance then moves to the populated part of the sauna. Sometimes men would have sex unseen, but it was common to use either the light of a smartphone or lighters to reveal and judge potential partners. Lights would only come on momentarily. While people found this irritating, they accepted that it allowed them to find the right sex partner – attractive and unoccupied. It was often taboo to join in with existing encounters, similar to blocking off different rooms in other types of bang. Saunas could be found in many neighbourhoods, but the biggest and most popular were reserved for Jongno and Itaewon. They outnumbered clubs and bars by a large degree in the city. Every venue was located in small alleyways, underground or on upper floors. When leaving, customers waited to check that no-one was passing before joining the ‘real world’ ² again. Saunas were busiest at nighttime, and especially on the weekends near entertainment districts. However, neighbourhood saunas had a more routine temporality, and could be full late on weekdays, as men would either use these places to sleep away from home or visit after post-work socialising.

Interviewees described saunas as comfortable, easy and hidden. They were used by some as places to relax, outside everyday responsibilities. In one man’s words, ‘when I’m there it’s dark and I feel cut off from the rest of the world’. Young and old alike said they enjoyed anonymity, that it was sexually exciting not to see their partners’ faces, except for a few seconds of decision making. Most important was that when they left the sauna, no-one would know they had been there. For most men, the darkness of the place ensured that their identity remained hidden. Saunas were seen as truly disconnected. One student in his 20s said that he found the moment of leaving the sauna empowering: ‘I’m the only one that knows what happened, it’s just in my own head’. This is the function of a dark Korean space, of a bang. It is a mechanism that cuts off the individual, or the group, from the rest of the Korean social world, which is deeply claustrophobic and allows little room for individual agency. Understanding the selective permeability of places like these is fundamental to a consideration of the impact of new technologies on the management of Korean men’s sexual desires.

Geosocial cruising

Despite the historically heavy role the Korean state has taken in the surveillance of the Internet (Hjorth, 2012), geosocial applications are outside direct jurisdiction. To sign up to the applications does not require that users verify identity against their national ID PIN, unlike most local websites. Most Korean men who desired a double life did not worry about the storage of their details ‘somewhere in America’, but instead found their everyday usage of the applications problematic. They feared being found out by people in the immediate context of use, where the applications represented networks that were potentially uncontrolled, where participation was paramount to broadcasting personal identity. As one man put it, ‘the world outside is right there and they’re looking in’.

I heard an urban legend a number of times. A geeky teenage girl discovered Jack’d and downloaded it to her phone. She did not upload a picture but created an account. Enamoured with the ‘pretty boys’, she took screenshots of users and uploaded them to a viral blog, commenting on their appearances and fashion choices. The consequences tended to differ with each retelling, but in every case some men were discovered. One version was that a man lost his job in a conglomerate (jaebeol), after being discovered by colleagues. The truth of this tale is unimportant; it indicates the degree to which geosocial cruising applications were seen as exposing. The fact that the story itself was viral alerted me to the anxiety these applications elicited, which tended to be much greater than explored in the literature. A possible interpretation was that the app itself was not particularly challenging, but the use the young woman made of it. It was the integration of the app with the mainstream Internet that was the problem. Many men told me they had to be careful with the Korean Internet because it was ‘more viral than elsewhere’. However, I would maintain that the anxiety was around the applications themselves, where men imagined the young woman as representative of the permeability of the apps with the world outside.

As has been suggested elsewhere (Gagné, 2012, McGlotten, 2013), success on geosocial cruising applications relies on uploading particular types of visual images, where certain types of self-presentation are more valued, implying a greater amount of traffic through these user’s profiles. Meeting standards of attractiveness increases the power of a user to achieve offline encounters. As Van De Wiele and Tong (2014) write, even among men who feel uncomfortable uploading photographs, the expectation is that sharing is an unavoidable step towards offline sexual encounters. There were a variety of profile pictures I encountered in Seoul. Comparing Seoul to London, relatively few photographs were unobscured pictures of faces. A substantial number were pictures of parts of people’s bodies, where the face was either excluded or obscured. A popular choice was to overlay pictures with emoticons or stickers, where the shape of the face was visible but features were replaced with cartoonish mouths and eyes. Other users uploaded different images: cartoons, pornography and pictures of models. However, many complained that they found others unforthcoming if they did not upload a genuine face picture to their profile.

Many profiles demanded that other users have visible face pictures before making first contact (Phillips, 2015). This demand was unclear to my interviewees. Did the other person want them to upload public pictures or send them in a message? In most cases, the latter would suffice but they had to make contact first with a picture. This potentially opened people up to rejection more explicitly. With a public image of their face, rejection would simply mean not be contacted by others. However, if they sent a clear photograph, the other party not reply would be a sign of failure. The management of rejection is tangential, but important is the idea that men in saunas were less ‘fussy’ (nuni nopji anta), where informants suggested that finding a sex partner was more likely. A toned body in saunas was better currency than an attractive face, whereas on applications the opposite was true. One man said, ‘they want to see photos of you from different angles, as proof that you are who you are’.

Phillips (2015) reports that users often go to lengths to remove identifying traces from photographs. Korean men performed similar self-surgery. I had frequent discussions with friends about how to make photos attractive yet anonymous. I watched as they edited selfies. One evening was spent watching a friend cut a naked photo of himself in half, so that his face and body were still visible but segmented. He asked me to search for him on the application to prove he was unrecognisable. Nonetheless, whether photos were public or shared in conversation, they were still troubling. Making contact, sending a photo to an unknown user, was risky. Users had no control over where the image would go and could not easily ascertain the true identity of another user. Could a friend, relative or colleague be hiding under a photograph of someone else? The Korean Internet was too viral to take risks, but risk needed to be taken to organise sexual encounters. The problem was that the connections that came after a photograph was released into the highly integrated world of the Korean Internet would be out of a user’s control.

Licoppe et al. (2016) write that ideal sexual encounters on Grindr should leave the user emotionally unaffected and should take place in a bubble disassociated from the other arenas of their lives, simply serving to provide immediate sexual gratification. For the men I worked with, this situation was desirable but efforts to compartmentalise were always compromised. After meeting another man for sex, sometimes men would block the other user from seeing their profile. Some men would insist on organising encounters in other parts of the city, so that they would not meet a sex partner accidentally on the street in the future. Even in these cases, men said the encounter played on their mind afterwards. One student called this ‘losing control’. He told me that while he enjoys the casual sex available on the applications, he increasingly feels like he might make a mistake, that he might accidentally expose himself through securing encounters online. He hints here at the stickiness of the applications. Where sexual encounters in saunas could be conducted without a fear of contamination, the use of applications to orchestrate offline encounters involved sharing and negotiating with visual images and locative functions. All of this resulted in a threat of leakage, where the integration of the offline and online could lead to accidental exposure.

Men’s worries about exposure were sometimes abstract, sometimes concrete. Certainly, some men I spoke to found using applications in particular spaces, such as work, more troubling. Applications were often kept behind locked files or deleted and reinstalled as men moved around the city. However, not all worries played on the use of applications in spaces that could be particularly exposing. A man who hailed from the other end of Korea said that while he used applications liberally abroad, he refused to even download the application in the country. He remarked that if he created a profile he would picture his mother looking in, ashamed of his sexual orientation. Other men felt similarly worried that the use of applications might reveal their predilections to family members, even if they lived apart. This could be called paranoia, and many men admitted that the prospect of this happening in a heavily populated city was unlikely. While men described saunas as a site of anonymity, applications were potentially connective in a host of different ways.

Scholars have suggested that Confucianism imparts a specific relationship between people, state and society, where the existence of true strangers is impossible. Kim (2010) argues that autonomous individuals do not constitute the basic unit of Korean society. Rather, individual empowerment is made through the recreation and transformation of existing relationships, where the self is individually agentive but also relational (Alford, 1999; Kim, 2010: 485). Kim suggests that the Korean social world is made of pre-existing relations, where there are no places people can act truly individually without considering the presence of all-consuming relationships, modelled ostensibly around family ties. However, the men I spoke to suggested that they were able to distinguish between strangers and others. The problem involved connectivity. Where men could find temporary respite in the dark space of the sauna, and an ability to compartmentalise their desires from the rest of their lives, the use of applications offered no such promise. Where the sauna was seen as an environment that mitigated the risk of exposure automatically, now risk had to be managed and decisions had to be made.

Scholars approach geosociality as a localised technology which should be researched by following empirical connections between devices and the offline. While I agree that these applications provide new spaces for sexual encounters, removing the centrality of space to gay communities, commentators also imply that sex has become both privatised and domesticated. Koreans have always relied on commercialised and semi-public locations for male–male sex partly because of a tendency to live with parents. While men agreed that applications individualised their sexual lives, allowing them to meet others alongside the flow of everyday life, they still relied on love motels and other spaces to orchestrate encounters. The result, I argue, is a bifurcated imagination of geosocial cruising: it at once engenders new opportunities but enters some Korean men into a problematic maelstrom of potential connection. There has emerged a new demand – an initial stage – of sharing, self-presentation and negotiation which is treated as a threat of integration. If anyone could log on to the applications, how could men ensure that this was a space beyond their investments in other arenas of social life?

I wonder whether further research would find similar anxieties and paranoias. The Korean context might be specific because of the particular arrangement of bang, zones cut off from the social world, but work on the West has covered similar ground. Outside of bang space, Korean imaginations of social ties can be total, but the applications require new techniques that seem risky in the hyper-viral landscape of the Korean Internet. Licoppe, Rivière and More’s vision of Grindr as a ‘bubble’ applies much better to the space of the sauna. The sauna did the insulation work automatically, there was no need to ensure anonymity by cutting up photographs, hiding location and organising hidden encounters. Men just needed to pay money, satisfy their desires and leave.

My point is that the connection between diverse new media and the offline is a culturally (even subculturally) bound negotiation that can involve agentive processes of compartmentalisation and other labour. While Korean men were able to secure sexual encounters, there was a second form of connection they failed to control. As the applications allow men to have sex in new spaces, the boundaries between spaces have become porous because the privacy of these new spaces is not materially and spatially enforced in the same way. A Western friend in my neighbourhood was visited by the police one day because elderly Korean residents nearby reported him on the suspicion that he had been running a brothel from home, due in part to his use of Grindr to organise sexual encounters. While this was a hilarious anecdote for him, my interviewees found it far from amusing. This was proof that regardless of what they chose to do, or who they managed to have sex with, there was always someone watching with uncertain intentions.

Conclusion

I have argued here that while integration as a theoretical/methodological principle for considering the proliferation of new media might be sound, the question of how particular devices and technologies integrate spaces and social relations should be treated as an ethnographic reality, a locally and culturally bound problem. It is interesting that this new form of connectivity, with photographs and other self-presentations as crucial to achieving offline encounters, is a particular problem for men who want to maintain double lives, where their sexual desires are hidden or isolated. Essentially, these applications and their integrative potentialities have reconfigured a problem these men face in trying to compartmentalise their sexual encounters from the rest of their lives. Anxieties over socio-technological connection and a blurring of boundaries between different arenas are major features of the contemporary queer experience in Korea. It is important to acknowledge, following McGlotten (2013) and Mowlabocus (2010) above, that these technologies are foreign in providence. Grindr and Jack’d, and geosocial networking more generally, are structured around a particular form of integration that posits a unity between users and physical space.

In other contexts, this integration might be seen as positive or convenient, but researchers need to consider the diversity of users. McGlotten (2013) demonstrates that just as applications provide some with easy sex, others are discriminated against and are nostalgic for a lo-fi model of cruising in physical spaces such as saunas. In Korea, I would suggest that applications have come to represent a different way of doing male–male sex and sexual desire, which is echoed in coming out narratives and the emergence of new sorts of commercialised club. While I cannot cover these aspects in this piece, I think here of Duggan’s notion of homonormativity (1999). The use of applications certainly seems to reflect a sense of privatised, individualised encounters, premised on a particular form of male–male unified sexual visibility in the public realm. By refusing, or troubling, integration were the men I worked with actively resisting this new sexual public? While my informants did trouble the structural principles of these applications, I would suggest that the applications were more troubling to their sense of self and the discontinuity they maintained between different arenas of their lives. While they found techniques of resistance, the new decisions and strategies they had to formulate look quite different from the momentary and fleeting sexual encounters of the sauna.

Ultimately, we do the physical world a disservice in our studies of technology in failing to consider that physical spaces too contain notions of (dis)connection. Instead of folding physicality into smartphones and applications, it is important to consider the ways people distinguish between the potential connectivities – and opportunities for different kinds of sex – that different spaces offer. Attention to the problem of infrastructure has been usefully developed in anthropological analyses of space (Larkin, 2013), but as we turn to geosociality in more detail we need to consider how connectivity is culturally negotiated. The transnational nature of many technologies is equally important, and we should maintain an awareness of how applications like Grindr and Jack’d can be threatening rather than freeing in integrating a range of spaces and arenas. This is particularly important in a context where geosocial applications are becoming dominant as tools for cruising, displacing the original architecture of saunas and other sites. The spatial and connective organisation that structured male–male sex in Korea is becoming increasingly fraught with the rise of new technologies, deeply impacting the lives of men who relied on these spaces in the first place.