Anne Helmond
Associate Professor of Media, Data & Society at Utrecht University. Anne co-leads the focus area ‘Governing the Digital Society’ with Prof. José van Dijck. Here, her research focuses on the processes of platformization, algorithmization, and datafication from an empirical and historical perspective. Her work emphasizes the material and programmable (data) infrastructures that underpin these processes.
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practice of mapping outlinks, but also of widgets, plugins and trackers from third-party sources. Unveiling parts of this larger web ecology is undertaken in a case study using archived snapshots of the New York Times between 1996 and 2011 from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, showing the traces of trackers such as web bugs, beacons, analytics and ads."
take the platform-specificity of social media platforms into account and look at the assemblage of platforms, software, databases, interfaces and users to understand how the
relations between platforms and users are mediated by both human actors and non-human actors such as software. This will be illustrated with a specific case study on the Facebook
platform as one of the major infrastructures of the data-intensive social web.
limits of its platform, offering devices that can make every website
and every web user part of Facebook. Through a case study on The Like
button, now embedded in over 2 million websites, it will be
illustrated how these social plugins form an important role in
extending Facebook’s platform features into the web. The Like button
is one of the main devices of the social web that allow data to flow
between what Felix Stalder (2012) refers to as the front-end of the
web, where users interact, and the back-end of the web, where these
interactions are turned into financial value. By connecting the two,
the platform creates a specific relation between economic value and
the social by turning user activity into valuable data which may be
sold to advertisers. This calls for a critical investigation into the
design of the platform and the politics of data by looking at the
medium-specific devices that create and organize data and dataflows in
the social web. Linking Facebook’s efforts to a historical perspective
on the hit and link economy, what might be in the making is not only a
social web, but a re-centralized, data intensive fabric - the Like
economy.
How can Facebook users and non-Facebook users respond to their
(un)willing contributions to the emerging Like Economy? How can we
make these practices visible, address them and possibly subvert them?
In this second part of the presentation we will look into a few
examples of tools that are designed to make users aware of the
previously discussed data-mining practices and disrupt the valuable
dataflows.
From this perspective, the panel explores a number of novel methodologies for app studies. So far, methodological approaches for studying apps have focused on end-user interfaces and how users interpret app affordances (McVeigh-Schultz and Baym 2015), qualitative analyses of their political economies and the politics of location (Dyer-Witheford 2014; Wilken and Bayliss 2015), their social norms of use (Humphreys 2007) or their affective capacities (Matviyenko et al. 2015). The empirical investigation of apps and their ecologies currently faces multiple challenges: First, in contrast to most data collected from web sites and platforms, user activities can neither be simply observed or scraped from front-end interfaces nor easily be collected via APIs. In order to access app data, researchers may need to participate in using the app, which only affords a partial view (e.g. in the case of Tinder, Snapchat, and messaging apps) thereby opening up a number of ethical concerns. Second, method development has to respond to apps’ fast update cultures. Like other internet-enabled technologies, apps are considered as services rather than products and have frequent development cycles, including design and features changes, which do not only require researchers to constantly adjust their tools and approaches, but which also make it particularly difficult to reconstruct the history of an app or its features.
This panel responds to these methodological challenges by advancing methodological approaches that all share a common device or medium-specific perspective, departing from the specific features of each app to attend to its data ecologies, political economies, practices, or histories, whilst reflecting critically on the relations between method and medium. One contribution advances digital methods for app analysis by mapping larger platform ecosystems in which apps emerge and thrive. It explores how apps reinforce, alter, and interfere in the interpretation of social media platforms and their features. Engaging with Facebook’s mobile app and its political economy, the second paper attends to the difficulties of getting access to historical app information whilst tracing relations between the introduction of new features and the advancement of the platform’s business model. A different approach to writing a microhistory of apps is offered in the third paper on the Twitter’s retweet button. Bringing together historical and ethnographic insights, this paper offers a detailed narrative of the becoming of a platform feature at the intersection of technicity, use practices, third-party apps and platform politics. The fourth and final paper focuses on the WeChat app and draws on ethnographic methods to explore the affordances of entanglement when the only way to study an app is by joining and participating in it.
All four papers approach apps not as discrete technologies, but as being situated and subject to distributed accomplishments of technicity, economics, practices, data, third parties, and platform politics. They connect platform studies and app studies by drawing attention to their intricate relations, e.g. in the case of platforms offering apps, apps built on top of platforms, apps facilitating practices that inform platforms, and apps functioning as platforms. The papers outline relations between and gaps in app and platform studies, as the study of platforms has identified the relevance of data circulation and the involvement of third parties, but has not explicitly asked how apps capitalise on platforms and vice-versa, or how they reinvent and inscribe into each other. From the perspective of app studies, adding a focus on platforms allows researchers to map the ecologies in which app data circulates as well as the regulatory rules and conditions for their development. The panel thus advances the field of app studies by exploring novel methods for empirical app research which allows to attend to the technicity, political economy, history, and enactment of app ecologies.