Apps and Infrastructures

Outline

Apps have become an important new cultural, technical, and economic software form. Most of today’s apps are designed to run on smartphones and other mobile devices and provide functions previously possible with other software forms (Morris & Elkins, 2015). However, they represent new ways in which software artefacts are developed, tested, packaged, promoted, distributed, monitored, monetised, downloaded, integrated, updated, stored, accessed, archived, interpreted, and used. To foreground the relational and material dimensions of apps, research should not only account for them as discrete media objects, but needs to approach apps as part of their multiple infrastructures and environments including app stores, development platforms, advertising technologies, analytics tools, and cloud services, among others.

App stores set the conditions for users and developers to distribute, browse, promote, monetise, rate, and download apps developed for Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, or other mobile operating systems. Developers draw on a variety of both official and third-party developer tools, including developer pages and reference documentation, application programming interfaces (APIs), software development kits (SDKs), integrated development environments (IDEs), and dedicated programming languages. Such resources are commonly employed in order to build, test, and monitor apps whilst appropriating the features and constraints of particular platforms and devices, thereby participating in the re-interpretation and re-evaluation of platform features and data. Furthermore, apps may also utilise a device’s built-in sensors for continuous data collection of movements, practices, and environments whilst being wirelessly connected to the cloud or other infrastructures,without the user necessarily knowing exactly when, how, or where (Mackenzie, 2010).

Approaching apps from an infrastructural perspective allows attending to the various socio-technical actors, layers, and inscriptions that inform app development, distribution, and usage in situated, distributed, and often dissimilar ways. Within such stacked intermediary infrastructures, platform logics of negotiation among heterogeneous stakeholders are multiplied and nested. This raises questions about the material and technological boundaries of apps and the subsequent need for methodologies to study apps’ socio-technical assemblages on multiple scales, attending to inbound and outbound data flows, governance and power, valuation, their political economy, and material semiotics. Previous research on apps – initially emerging at the intersection of mobile studies and media studies – considered mobile apps as a form of mobile or location-based media transforming and generating new forms of communication and sociality, places, and publics through the affordances and practices associated with mobile artefacts (Goggin & Hjorth, 2014). While these studies raised general questions about the boundaries of apps, attention was primarily directed to apps as compartmentalised software applications and their relations with affect, bodies, and locales (Farman 2012; Matviyenko et al., 2015; Morris & Elkins, 2015). A second strand of app research has moved beyond such a single app focus and directed primary attention to the materialities and infrastructures of apps by engaging with their data cultures, material connections, political economic underpinnings, and ecologies (Albury et al., 2017; Farman, 2015; Goldsmith in Goggin & Hjorth, 2014; Horst, 2013; Nieborg, 2017; Wilken, 2015).

This Special Issue of Computational Culture welcomes proposals and projects from scholars and practitioners from across different disciplines interested in the advancement of app studies at the intersection of apps and infrastructures. Studies of mobile apps, platform native apps, and web browser apps or extensions are particularly encouraged. We specifically seek articles that bring together conceptual work with a technically and empirically grounded perspective, addressing the methodological challenges associated with the critical study of apps and their intricate relations to other software, platforms, and infrastructures. Contributors are encouraged to move beyond studies of single apps and their users in favor of approaches that explore apps as material artefacts alongside the infrastructures, political economy, and environments in which they are embedded and situationally enacted. We thus encourage interdisciplinary contributions that traverse boundaries between the fields of software studies, platform studies, cultural and media studies, science and technology studies, as well as political economy and data critique.

Topics and projects might include:

• The relations between apps and their wider material and infrastructural environments, including app stores, development platforms and toolkits, analytics tools, advertising technologies, and cloud services.
• The methodological and empirical challenges associated with the critical study of apps, including concerns about accessibility to mobile app backends and the limits of data retrieval through APIs or scraping methods as used in web research.
• Studies of apps as articulations of technicity (e.g., how they are designed, built, maintained, and updated) and the data cultures they produce (e.g., what data do they collect or require).
• Detailed empirical and critical studies exploring apps’ data cultures, usage tracking, technical dependencies and app permissions, sensor technologies, and wireless access points.
• Inventive methods to conceptualise how apps are located or situated, given they are utilising a mobile device’s built-in sensors as well as accessing other resources from remote cloud infrastructures.
• Studies of the political economy of apps (e.g., how apps are valued and monetized), the role of industry partnerships and third parties (e.g., how apps are re-interpreted or extended), and the politics of operability (e.g., how apps negotiate among stakeholders or interests).
• Explorations of the techno-economic relations between the web and app ecosystems, including the dependencies of apps on web platforms and cloud services, as well as the regulations and limits of app development by device manufacturers and mobile operating systems like Android and iOS.
• Explorations of the ways and mechanisms through which multiple apps are interconnected, forming collections, ecologies, and chains of apps in specific practices (e.g., task and content automation).
• Media archaeologies exploring historical constellations of apps and their wider material and infrastructural environments and other historical approaches to app research.
• Explorations of app stores as the primary environment or infrastructure for mobile apps, including contributions focusing on non-Western apps and app stores, apps’ update cultures, and their development cycles.
• The ways in which different material and infrastructural environments, such as app stores, cater to distinct mobile operating systems, devices, and geographic regions.
• Critical artistic interventions and research software tools that repurpose the affordances of apps, app stores and other native environments, and explore their data cultures.

Schedule

750 word abstracts should be emailed to apps.infrastructures@gmail.com by April 1, 2018.

Any queries can be addressed to the editors at apps.infrastructures@gmail.com.

Abstracts will be reviewed by the Computational Culture Editorial Board and the Special Issue editors. Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by May 1, 2018 and invited to submit full manuscripts by September 15, 2018. These manuscripts are subject to full blind peer review according to Computational Culture’s policies. The issue will be published in March 2019.

Computational Culture is an online open access peer-reviewed journal of interdisciplinary enquiry into the nature of cultural computational objects, practices, processes and structures. http://computationalculture.net/

References

• Albury, K., Burgess, J., Light, B., et al. (2017) Data cultures of mobile dating and hook-up apps: Emerging issues for critical social science research. Big Data & Society, 4(2). DOI: 10.1177/2053951717720950.
• Farman, J. (2012) Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. New York, NY: Routledge.
• Farman, J. (2015) Infrastructures of Mobile Social Media. Social Media + Society, 1(1). DOI: 10.1177/2056305115580343.
• Goggin, G. & Hjorth, L. (Eds.) (2013) The Routledge companion to mobile media. Oxford: Routledge.
• Goldsmith, B. (2014) The Smartphone App Economy and App Ecosystems. In G. Goggin & L. Hjorth (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media, New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 171–180.
• Horst, H. A. (2013) The infrastructures of mobile media: Towards a future research agenda. Mobile Media & Communication, 1(1): 147–152. DOI: 10.1177/2050157912464490.
• Mackenzie, A. (2010) Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
• Matviyenko, S., Ticineto Clough, P., & Galloway, A. R. (2015) On governance, blackboxing, measure, body, affect and apps: A conversation with Patricia Ticineto Clough and Alexander R. Galloway. The Fibreculture Journal (25): 10–29. DOI: 10.15307/fcj.25.179.2015.
• Morris, J. W., & Elkins E (2015) There’s a history for that: Apps and mundane software as commodity. The Fibreculture Journal (25): 63–88. DOI: 10.15307/fcj.25.181.2015.
• Nieborg, D. B. (2017) Free-to-play games and app advertising: The rise of the player commodity. In J. F. Hamilton, R. Bodle, & E. Korin (Eds.), Explorations in Critical Studies of Advertising, New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 28–41.
• Wilken, R. (2015) Mobile media and ecologies of location. Communication Research and Practice, 1(1): 42–57. DOI: 10.1080/22041451.2015.1042423.