Community is the biggest form of support system that any organism requires. Wolves hunt in packs to leverage better prey and humans live in communities to protect their interests and make life easier. Within those major communities, exists smaller more specific communities based on common traits and needs. These communities often thrive in existence with others and while being a part of the community is basic nature to humans, not everybody finds their community with ease.
On these lines, we can safely say that one such community is the LGBTQI community. It is a gender and sexual minority community for anyone who identifies as something beyond the relative cis heteronormativity. While being a part of the community is essential and helpful, finding that community is another task. In cultures where homosexuality and fluidity are still taboo subjects, it is internet applications like Grindr, Blued or Planet Romeo which provide safe heavens for these community interactions.
Happiness is an emotive state of well-being or positive emotions where a person experiences joy, pleasure or satisfaction. One of the biggest issues for minorities is to find spaces, crowds and environments where they feel safe, appreciated and belong. While most minorities are simply able to find such spaces through communications or symbolic representations, it is not often the case with the LGBTQI community. Shame, guilt, rejection, harassment, and stereotyping are some of the things that many people go on to face on daily basis.
In such circumstances, Grindr comes out as a haven for these people as it helps in discreet communication, interactions, and experiences between members of the community and sometimes even outsiders. What makes it so unique over any other social media, hook-up or dating app is the fact that it uses geosocial tags to locate people in the immediate vicinity and to categorize people based on their distance from the user. It also allows viewing of a large number of people, from which the user can choose whom to interact. While these small features might sound like basic technology, they have played a very essential part in the entire Queer community.
Even though humans are social creatures it is very difficult to find like-minded individuals for healthy interactions at any place on the earth. What Grind essentially does is that it gives way to sexual liberation, a space which plays different roles for different people. While some essentially use these apps for a sexual encounter, many use them to find love, friends or simply someone to talk to. These applications are also used to promote these LGBTQI parties, which are a recent trend in all the growing metro cities all over India. They act as an exclusive invitation-only kind of medium which keeps any outsider at bay. And while many people use it for different reasons it is essentially the key for queer people to find solace within their community.
The application has not only introduced sexual liberation in the queer community, but it also helps people combat loneliness by simply helping to find like-minded individuals in their vicinity. While this application has essentially changed the dynamics of social interactions, we also need to look at how they are affecting the users in a completely new manner. Grindr has made sex accessible. After downloading the application, just a few one-liners and a person can have somebody over to their place. It has essentially removed the courting phase in which the cis heteronormative people spend most of their time, impressing their partners. People can also choose between people of different ethnicities, body shapes and preferences. While the essential reason for Grindr is to be a platform for the LGBTQI community, it also has some psychological issues which we cannot simply ignore.
Classical conditioning:
According to neuroscience, orgasms activate pleasure areas of the brain such as the ventral tegmental area and deactivate areas associated with self-control. These activation patterns in men are strikingly similar to those observed in the brains of heroin and cocaine users (Vox,2018). When a neutral action (such as clicking on a profile on Grindr) is combined with a pleasurable brain response (orgasm), humans learn to repeat that action. This is simply a case of classical conditioning where continuous positive interactions can be very rewarding. However, these interactions can also impact a person’s self-esteem and psychological well-being when they do not go in their favour. Hence all of this can be a normal pleasure response or a precursor to addiction or low self-esteem, depending on the situation and individual.
Variable ratio reinforcement:
Grindr also reinforces something which we call variable ratio reinforcement. It is a phenomenon where the rewards which come in the way of meeting or chatting with a person of interest, come at unpredictable intervals. A person might open the application and immediately find a hook-up while sometime it might ne hours before they even have a chat with somebody. While this is one of the most effective ways of reinforcement, it sometimes leads to people being simply addicted to the application. Spending hours hoping to have that hook-up or looking out for people to talk to, things do not occur in a predictable pattern, making Grind both interesting and addictive for people. This is the same principle that works for gamblers. Gamblers never know when they might win and hence the anticipation of a reward enables them to play even when they might lose their wealth.
Hence, Grindr acts as a medium of addiction, where people spend as much as 10 hours at a time looking for that instant gratification in form of a casual hookup. While the phrase addiction is controversial in some respects, it helps explains the distress that people feel where on one hand they have this technological miracle which brings them ever closer to their desires without much effort, and on the other hand, it also throws them into a vicious cycle of constantly being on and off the application.
While there is a lot that is not studied and researched in this field, the limited information, interviews and first-hand experiences give some insight into how such apps affect happiness and well-being in a high-tech world.
Kumar Anchwan
Jindal School of Psychology and Counselling
(Batch 2024)
Email id- 21jspc-kanchwan@jgu.edu.in
