Apps. Gerard Goggin

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Название Apps
Автор произведения Gerard Goggin
Жанр Социология
Серия
Издательство Социология
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781509538508



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realities and future scenarios appear very bleak. By way of concluding the book, I look at the role of apps in the grand social project of putting media and communications firmly back in people’s hands.

      Apps are designed to perform as concrete software objects but are continually transformed … the notion of apps as entirely self-contained also belies their involvement in the data flows of multi-sided platforms and their necessary entanglement with varying hardware devices and digital infrastructures that make their operations at once possible and, indeed, valuable. (Dieter et al., 2019, p. 2)

      In addition to these four landmarks in app studies, extensive research on apps has been carried out and distributed across the reaches of many disciplines and fields, much of which I have consulted and drawn upon in the following chapters (insofar as space permitted).

      While apps have taken shape via other digital technologies such as smartphones, at the most fundamental level they are a form of software. They are constituted via programming and coding, which have materialities that shape the design, implementations, and effects of apps, as the case of news shows us (Weber & Kosterich, 2018). Since the emergence of software studies, theories and research around software have moved beyond grappling with the complexity of software and attempted especially to pinpoint its pivotal and catalytic role in the creation of digital media.

      Apps have reshaped the Internet and how we experience it—especially because their emergence coincides with the rise of social media. Many of the most popular apps are social media apps such as the popular Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, or Instagram services. Social media apps foster what José van Dijck has called a “culture of connectivity” (van Dijck, 2013). They also make it hard for us to disconnect from digital networks (Hesselberth, 2018). Many social media services started as Internet services or as pre-smartphone mobile services. This includes Facebook, which many users experience and think of as a mobile app, not as an Internet-based software for a desktop or laptop computer. With mobile media, especially smartphones, come the kinds of affordances that offer different inventions and appropriations of social media, notably portability, availability, locatability, and multimediality, as Andrew Schrock argues (Schrock, 2015). The mix of connectivity and affordances is taken in new directions by messaging apps such as Line, WeChat, and WhatsApp, to mention but a few.

      If nothing else, the rise of apps has been underpinned by an extraordinary growth in data and by the increasing role that smartphones and apps play in the new data infrastructures, economy, ecologies, and cultures. So here we find a range of critical work on data helpful for understanding apps. This work encompasses the part they play in surveillance (Thurman, 2018); the concept of data colonialism, including the compulsory nature of data enlistment, and the stakes in disconnection (Couldry & Mejias, 2019); the sociology of data selves and identities (Lupton, 2016, 2020); data sharing and social practices (Grundy et al., 2019); the leaky nature of data and the fragmented contexts of apps (Wilmott, 2016).

      A stumbling block here is the way in which apps are used, at least in much public discourse, to frame a familiar, welcoming user perspective on emerging technology developments. Also challenging is the way in which apps are conjoined with algorithms in promises of brighter, seductive social futures, and also in their dystopian, dark sides. An excellent example of this can be seen in imaginaries and in plans for future smart cities (Green, 2019), or in the area of digital government and service delivery—what Paul Henman dubs “digital social policy” (Henman, 2019).

      An important shift in the nature of apps has occurred with the arrival of “digital platforms.” Now in their ascendancy, digital platforms represent a new phase for apps. They have their origins in the different computer operating systems and software of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Windows and Apple. Games platforms also appeared; they represent another kind of “platform wars”—for instance, rivalries between Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft and, later, between streaming providers such as Twitch (Taylor, 2018), Facebook Gaming, and YouTube Gaming. Games had a formative role in the invention of creative and computational aspects of digital platforms (Andreessen, 2007; Bogost & Monfort 2009).