Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Sex-seeking apps such as Grindr have helped gay men craft pseudonymous personas, extend communication, and introduce users who might not otherwise meet. This presents challenges and opportunities for HIV prevention, as apps represent novel risk environments that amplify some of prevention's pre-existing challenges while also offering new opportunities for outreach and engagement. While stakeholders such as public health, community-based groups and technologists have experimented with Web 2.0 tools, little evidence suggests that any of these approaches are effective. Practitioners know that digital approaches are necessary but nobody is quite certain about how this should be done. Based on stakeholder interviews conducted in Vancouver and San Francisco, I suggest that many of the challenges associated with Internet interventions come not from the technology itself but are mediated by a range of social, political, cultural and economic factors that we need to take into account during design and implementation. This presentation identifies a number of these issues cited by practitioners, including economic cutbacks, privacy concerns and institutional inertia when it comes to sexuality and health. Taken together, they suggest that our technologies are embedded within complex structures that can often frustrate efforts to sufficiently leverage them for HIV prevention. However, this does not mean that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. Technology studies and the history of innovation, for example, suggest that failure, rather than success, is the norm. This means that we should continue developing apps in this area rather than give up at the first sign of "failure". We also need to be aware that while technological change feels sudden and rapid, changing technology itself is a slow process. I end by encouraging us to keep this in mind, as sexual health is an exciting and important area that needs more creative thinking around technology.