Location-Based Gay Communication: An Empirical Study of Smartphone Gay Apps Use in Macau

The rapid growth of the new media technologies incubated on smartphone and other open-platform devices is changing the landscape of mobile computing, which increasingly meets users’ information and communication needs. The location-based service (LBS) applications have become a prominent platform for their social networking, relationship maintenance and build up sense of community for minority groups like gays. This paper aims to probe the using of smartphone gay apps in Macau with the theoretical prism of symbolic convergence and media-richness. Accurately narrowed its study object to gay apps users around Macau, the current study presents how do the gay apps users reconstruct their “imaged communities” and face the changes brought by LBS technologies on their daily lives.