Articles by Fernando van der Vlist
Social Media + Society, 2022
“Big Tech” platform companies like Alphabet (Google), Apple, and Amazon are deeply invested in th... more “Big Tech” platform companies like Alphabet (Google), Apple, and Amazon are deeply invested in the future of automobility—from developing car-specific interfaces and self-driving technology to establishing business partnerships with automakers. Far from business-as-usual, we explain how Big Tech is reshaping the traditional automotive industry by making the car “platform ready,” as imposed on the web before it. The article considers how this novel transformation of automobility is increasingly significant for critical scholars of social media, platforms, and platformization, as bespoke forms of mediated, datafied, and platformized, sociality emerge. Specifically, we identify six levels upon which this platformization of automobility is unfolding and through which Big Tech is reorganizing the automotive industry according to platform logics concerning programmability, modularity, connectivity, data collection, and developmental partnerships. We do so by analyzing academic and technical literature, industry reports, and initiatives with a stake in platform automobility. Finally, we suggest directions for further research into Big Tech’s stake in the future of automobility, as these new dynamics begin to reshape the automotive industry at large.
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Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2024
‘Digital methods’ turn to medium-specific and online avenues for social and cultural research. Wh... more ‘Digital methods’ turn to medium-specific and online avenues for social and cultural research. While these approaches foster empirical media studies, it has become increasingly challenging to ‘follow the medium’ and ‘repurpose’ its methods. The prominence of sensory media such as ‘smart’ networked devices (e.g. mobile phones) in mundane practices and their infrastructural dependencies confront media scholars with highly contingent objects of study. Yet, studying such sensor-based devices is crucial, for they enable continuous and unnoticed monitoring of everyday (inter)activity. The article suggests that developing digital methods for sensory media can be understood as specific ‘critical technical practice’ (CTP) by engaging with two toolmaking stories. It draws on and emphasises the fundamental similarity between CTP and digital methods which both aim at conjoining technical engagement and understanding with methodological reflection. The toolmaking stories explicate the making of and the limitations to developing digital methods for increasingly obfuscated mobile sensory media, exploring the possibilities of repurposing their functionality and data. They include building tools for app code analysis focused on apps’ capacity to track sensor data, as well as for ‘sensing’ and analysing network traffic of mobile devices in use. The featured toolmaking then unravels distinctive research affordances, that is, action possibilities for ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ modes of analysis grappling with the technicity of mobile sensory media and their data. We argue that toolmaking as CTP for sensory media studies implies engaging with these media as entangled infrastructures, examining not just their social, but also their technical ‘multi-situatedness’. This involves investigating the ‘liveliness’ of their data, or how it is generated, processed and made sense of. In conclusion, we discuss implications for ‘doing digital methods’ in sensory media research. Toolmaking itself becomes an inevitable form of media research and critique, inviting and challenging researchers to deploy the media’s situatedness for their investigations.
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AI & Society: Knowledge, Culture and Communication, 2024
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are becoming increasingly significant area... more Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are becoming increasingly significant areas of research for scholars in science and technology studies (STS) and media studies. In March 2020, Waymo, Google/Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle project, introduced the ‘Open Dataset Virtual Challenge’, an annual competition leveraging their Waymo Open Dataset. This freely accessible dataset comprises annotated autonomous vehicle data from their own Waymo vehicles. Yearly, Waymo has continued to host iterations of this challenge, inviting teams of computer scientists to tackle evolving machine learning and vision problems using Google’s data and tools. This article analyses these challenges, situating them within the context of the ‘Grand Challenges’ of artificial intelligence (AI), which aimed to foster accountable and commercially viable advancements in the late 1980s. Through two exploratory workshops we adopted a ‘technographic’ approach to examine the pivotal role of challenges in the development and political economy of AI. Serving as an organising principle for the AI innovation ecosystem, the challenge connects companies and external collaborators, driving advancements in specific machine vision domains. By exploring six key themes—interface methods, incrementalism, metrics, AI vernacular, applied domains, and competitive advantages—the article illustrates the role of these challenges in shaping AI research and development. By unpacking the dynamic interaction between data, computation, and labor, these challenges serve as catalysts propelling advancements toward self-driving technologies. The study reveals how challenges have historically and presently shaped the evolving landscape of self-driving and AI technologies.
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Big Data & Society, 2024
Critical scholars contend that ‘There is no AI without Big Tech’. This study delves into the subs... more Critical scholars contend that ‘There is no AI without Big Tech’. This study delves into the substantial role played by major technology conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google (Alphabet), in the ‘industrialisation of artificial intelligence’ (AI). This concept encapsulates the shift of AI technologies from the research and development stage to practical, real-world applications across diverse industry sectors, resulting in new dependencies and associated investments. We employ the term ‘Big AI’ to encapsulate the structural convergence of AI and Big Tech, characterised by the profound interdependence of AI with the infrastructure, resources, and investments of these major technology companies. Using a ‘technographic’ approach, our study scrutinises the infrastructural support and investments of Big Tech in the AI sector, focusing on corporate partnerships, acquisitions, and financial investments. Additionally, we conduct a detailed examination of the complete spectrum of cloud platform products and services offered by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. We demonstrate that AI is not merely an abstract idea but an actual technology stack encompassing infrastructure, models, applications, and an ecosystem of applications and companies relying on this stack. Significantly, these tech giants have seamlessly integrated all three components of the stack into their cloud offerings. Furthermore, they have developed industry-focused solutions and marketplaces aimed at attracting third-party developers and businesses, fostering the growth of a broader AI ecosystem. This analysis underscores the intricate interdependence between AI and cloud infrastructure, emphasising the industry-specific aspects of cloud AI.
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New Media & Society, 2024
‘Super apps’ are on the rise. This study explores the characteristics, origins, and manifestation... more ‘Super apps’ are on the rise. This study explores the characteristics, origins, and manifestations of these apps worldwide, presenting the concept of ‘super-appification’ to describe processes of conglomeration in the global digital economy. Super apps aim to become deeply integrated into people’s everyday lives, capturing and monetising essential activities. By analysing 41 super apps, we identify four distinct types of ‘super-app constellations’, showcasing different patterns and dynamics of conglomeration: ‘Swiss-Army Knife’ apps that consolidate services in one app, ‘Family’ apps that expand through subsidiaries, and ‘Host’ and ‘Hub’-style apps that leverage external developers. This typology offers a comprehensive understanding of the conglomeration patterns underpinning the rise of super apps, involving corporate, development and international expansion strategies. Ultimately, super-appification represents an intensified form of ‘appification’, as these apps increasingly pervade and commodify various aspects of everyday life, such as payment, insurance, grocery delivery, mobility and travel, with significant sociopolitical implications.
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Internet Policy Review, 2021
This article provides a comprehensive mapping of the global ecosystem of COVID-19 pandemic respon... more This article provides a comprehensive mapping of the global ecosystem of COVID-19 pandemic response apps. After considering policy updates by Google Play’s and Apple’s App Store, we analyse all the available response apps in July 2020; their different response types; the apps’ developers and geographical distribution; the ecosystem’s ‘generativity’ and developers’ responsiveness during the unfolding pandemic; the apps’ discursive positioning; and material conditions of their development. Google and Apple are gatekeepers of these app ecosystems and exercise control on different layers, shaping the pandemic app response as well as the relationships between governments, citizens, and other actors. We suggest that this global ecosystem of pandemic responses reflects an exceptional mode of what we call pandemic platform governance, where platforms have negotiated their commercial interests and the public interest in exceptional circumstances.
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Social Media + Society, 2022
Researchers, policymakers, and competition and regulation authorities worldwide recognize the uti... more Researchers, policymakers, and competition and regulation authorities worldwide recognize the utility of application programming interfaces (APIs) in powering the digital economy and driving datafication and platformization processes. However, it remains unclear how the APIs of leading social media relate to platform governance and how this relationship evolved. This article traces the evolution of Facebook’s APIs, which evolved from a relatively simple programming interface for data access into a complex layered and interconnected governance arrangement. The study draws on a large corpus of (archived) developer pages and API reference documentation to examine the history of Facebook’s API governance; that is, the governance of and by Facebook through its APIs. This historical analysis emphasizes the technical dimensions and dynamics of what, how, and whom powerful platforms seek to govern, thus highlighting the technicity of platform governance and how it evolved. Because APIs facilitate and govern the material conditions of app development and the social and economic processes they sustain, powerful platforms influence the evolution of their larger ecosystems. As such, the technicity of Facebook’s API governance represents a major source of the platform’s “infrastructural power.”
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Big Data & Society, 2021
Social media platforms' digital advertising revenues depend considerably on partnerships. Busines... more Social media platforms' digital advertising revenues depend considerably on partnerships. Business partnerships are endemic and essential to the business of platforms, yet their role remains relatively underexplored in the literature on platformisation and platform power. This article considers the significance of partnerships in the social media ecosystem to better understand how industry platforms, and the infrastructure they build, mediate and shape platform power and governance. We argue that partners contribute to 'platformisation' through their collective development of business-to-business platform infrastructures. Specifically, we examine how partners have integrated social media platforms with what we call the audience economy-an exceptionally complex global and interconnected marketplace of intermediaries involved in the creation, commodification, analysis, and circulation of data audiences for purposes including but not limited to digital advertising and marketing. We determined which relationships are involved, which are exclusive or shared, and identified key ecosystem partners. Further, we found that partners build and integrate extensive infrastructures for data-sourcing and media distribution, surfacing infrastructural and strategic sources and locations, or 'nodes', of power in this ecosystem. The empirical findings thus highlight the significance of partnerships and partner integrations and draw attention to the powerful industry players and intermediaries that remain largely invisible.
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TMG – Journal for Media History, 2019
In this article, we propose a methodological outlook for historical platform studies to increase ... more In this article, we propose a methodological outlook for historical platform studies to increase the prominence of platform historiography in the field and practice of web history and archiv-ing. We discuss the challenges of social media archiving and the research opportunities for 'platform' historiography by focusing on the distinctive characteristics of web-based social media 'platforms'. Based on our review of the literature, we argue that it is critical to foreground how contemporary platforms serve multiple user groups beyond end users (e.g. developers, business, investors) and how they operate on multiple levels (e.g. interface, architecture, ecosystem). By attending to the multiple sides and layers of social media beyond their end users only, we can reconstruct histories of platforms, not only as social networks, but also as technical artefacts , business organisations, and more. A focus on the materiality of platforms introduces numerous underutilised archived web sources that present significant entry points and research opportunities for platform historiography. We assess the availability of these archived sources across the leading web archives. Our results show that despite the challenges of social media archiving, platforms' resources are in fact well-preserved if we look beyond their end-user interfaces. Drawing on illustrative examples, we discuss two sets of entry points and materials for platform historiography at length: first, for writing developer-side histories, and second, for business-side histories. We conclude with recommendations for platform historians and archiv-ing practitioners and reflections on the future of platform historiography.
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Computational Culture, 2019
In this special issue editorial, we introduce a research agenda for empirical app studies. First,... more In this special issue editorial, we introduce a research agenda for empirical app studies. First, we introduce the three main strands of scholarship that have engaged with (mobile) apps and infrastructures so far. This enables us to position the contributions to this special issue at the cutting edge of the research on apps and infrastructures. We present our theoretical perspective on the infrastructural situatedness of apps to foreground how apps are always relational and, therefore, situated in a technological as well as social and cultural sense. From this perspective, we outline the contours of the app/infrastructure stack, which proposes to account for the hierarchical layered structure of apps and infrastructures, including their various interrelations and interdependencies. Finally, we derive six emerging research themes for future app studies based on the eight contributions included in this special issue that we hope will motivate further innovative and critical research into apps and infrastructures specifically as well as into computational culture in general.
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Computational Culture, 2019
In this article, we empirically analyse the infrastructural relations between mobile apps and soc... more In this article, we empirically analyse the infrastructural relations between mobile apps and social media platforms and present a methodology to account for app–platform relations. Contrary to previous research on platforms and apps, we develop our approach from the perspective of apps based on a relational understanding of infrastructure. Our app-centric approach to platforms and infrastructure provides critical insights into (i) the kinds of third-party apps developed on the peripheries of social media platforms, (ii) the diverse practices and features supported and extended by those apps, and (iii) the messy and contingent nature of the relations between apps and social media platforms. Our approach provides insights into alternative forms of platform programmability beyond APIs and into social media-based ‘innovation’ app ecosystems driven by creative developer workarounds. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative forms of analysis of Android and iOS apps related to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter, we explore how third-party apps engage with the specific ‘grammars of action’ of social media platforms and outline five distinct forms of regramming. With regramming, we refer to how app developers work with and around the affordances, action grammars, and constraints imposed by platforms for using their data and functionality. We conclude with conceptual and methodological reflections on the infrastructural relations between apps and social media platforms, app stores, and mobile platforms from the perspective of apps.
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Social Media + Society, 2019
This article discusses methodological approaches to app studies, focusing on their embeddedness a... more This article discusses methodological approaches to app studies, focusing on their embeddedness and situatedness within multiple infrastructural settings. Our approach involves close attention to the multivalent affordances of apps as software packages, particularly their capacity to enter into diverse groupings and relations depending on different infrastructural situations. The changing situations they evoke and participate in, accordingly, make apps visible and accountable in a variety of unique ways. Therefore, engaging with and even staging these situations allows for political-economic, social, and cultural dynamics associated with apps and their infrastructures to be investigated through a style of research we describe as multi-situated app studies. This article offers an overview of four different entry points of enquiry that are exemplary of this multi-situated approach, focusing on app stores, app interfaces, app packages, and app connections. We conclude with nine propositions that develop out of these studies as prompts for further research.
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Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society, 2019
The purpose of this article is to operationalise an evolutionary perspective on the history of so... more The purpose of this article is to operationalise an evolutionary perspective on the history of social media and to trace Facebook’s evolution from a social networking site to a “platform-as-infrastructure”. Social media platforms such as Facebook change constantly on the level of their platform architectures, interfaces, governance frameworks, and control mechanisms, all while responding to their larger environments. By examining the evolution of Facebook’s programmability and corporate partnerships, we develop an empirical historical analysis of the platform’s boundary dynamics that ultimately determine its operational scale and scope. Based on our analysis of a unique set of archived primary sources, we discern four main stages in Facebook’s long-term evolution and discuss the interplay between ongoing processes of “platformisation” and “infrastructuralisation”. We argue that these terms foreground complementary aspects of the platform’s efforts in balancing its expansion and adaptability to changing user needs and other “environmental dynamics” without risking its integrations and embedding in other domains, such as advertising, marketing, and publishing. Ultimately, our contribution illustrates how empirical platform histories can denaturalise the current dominant position of social media platforms, such as Facebook, revealing over a decade of incremental evolution rather than revolution.
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There is a methodological tendency in work on diaspora and digital media for quantitative investi... more There is a methodological tendency in work on diaspora and digital media for quantitative investigations to approach diaspora in static ways that contrast with theories of diaspora as a dynamic cultural formation. On the other hand, qualitative, ethnographic work tends not to engage with digital methods and quantitative data‐driven investigation. In this article, we sketch this methodological and disciplinary disconnect and address it by proposing a model for understanding digitally mediated formations of diaspora that combines digital methods techniques with a sensitivity to ethical and theoretical discussions of migration and diaspora. Drawing on interpretive epistemologies and feminist research ethics, we present a case study analysis of a locally informed, Turkish–Dutch issue. We argue for a method that produces ‘mattering maps’. This involves tracking and visualizing digital traces of an issue across web platforms (Google Search results, Facebook pages, and Instagram posts) and integrating this with an analysis of the face‐to‐face interview responses of a key issue actor.
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Global Networks, 2018
There is a methodological tendency in work on diaspora and digital media for quantitative investi... more There is a methodological tendency in work on diaspora and digital media for quantitative investigations to approach diaspora in static ways that contrast with theories of diaspora as a dynamic cultural formation. On the other hand, qualitative, ethnographic work tends not to engage with digital methods and quantitative data‐driven investigation. In this article, we sketch this methodological and disciplinary disconnect and address it by proposing a model for understanding digitally mediated formations of diaspora that combines digital methods techniques with a sensitivity to ethical and theoretical discussions of migration and diaspora. Drawing on interpretive epistemologies and feminist research ethics, we present a case study analysis of a locally informed, Turkish–Dutch issue. We argue for a method that produces ‘mattering maps’. This involves tracking and visualizing digital traces of an issue across web platforms (Google Search results, Facebook pages, and Instagram posts) and integrating this with an analysis of the face‐to‐face interview responses of a key issue actor.
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This short piece examines Data Selfie, an open-source Chrome browser extension that collects and ... more This short piece examines Data Selfie, an open-source Chrome browser extension that collects and analyses data about your behaviour on facebook.com. We describe how Data Selfie works, what data it does and does not collect, what kind of data profiles or "selfies" it generates, and what type of data awareness raising strategy it employs.
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Surveillance & Society, 2017
This article critically examines mass surveillance technology revealed by Snowden’s disclosures. ... more This article critically examines mass surveillance technology revealed by Snowden’s disclosures. It addresses that we do not only live in a society where surveillance is deeply inscribed but more urgently, that it is increasingly difficult to study surveillance when its technologies and practices are difficult to distinguish from everyday routines. Considerably, many of the technologies and systems utilised for surveillance purposes were not originally designed as proper surveillance technologies. Instead, they have effectively become surveillance technologies by being enrolled into a particular surveillant assemblage. Three contributions are made towards critical scholarship on surveillance, intelligence, and security. First, a novel empirical cartographic methodology is developed that employs the vocabularies of assemblages and actor–networks. Second, this methodology is applied to critically examine global mass surveillance according to Snowden. Multiple leaked data sources have been utilised to trace actors, their associations amongst each other, and to create several graphical maps and diagrams. These maps provide insights into actor types and dependence relations described in the original disclosed documents. Third, the analytical value of three ordering concepts as well as the logistics of surveillance are explored via notable actors and actor groups. In short, this contribution provides empirical cartographic methods, concepts, and analytical targets for critically examining surveillance technology and its particular compositions. It addresses challenges of resisting mass surveillance and some forms of data activism, and calls for the continuing proliferation of counter-maps to facilitate grounded critique, to raise awareness, and to gain a foothold for meaningful resistance against mass surveillance.
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Big Data & Society, 2016
This study explores Big Data practices at Facebook through an investigation of the role of commen... more This study explores Big Data practices at Facebook through an investigation of the role of commensuration or ‘the transformation of different qualities into a common metric’ in the structuration of analysis and interaction with a major online social media platform. It proposes a conceptual framework and demonstrates the empirical potential of a pragmatic approach based on reading published materials and available documentation. Facebook’s Data Warehousing and Analytics Infrastructure serves as an illustrative example to begin tracing out and describe data assemblages in more detail. In being attentive to the motivations, drivers and challenges engineers face when dealing with Big Data, it is argued that their solutions can enable and support but also constrain specific analytical and transactional capabilities or data flows between various devices and actors. The analysis thus moves beyond methodological critiques of the utility of Big Data that lack empirical support and specificity. It is further argued that analytics not just describe but also actively participate in the enactment of social worlds, thereby opening possibilities for new markets or market segments to arise. Online sociality accounts for a model of the social that makes it visible and measurable qua markets inviting data recontextualisation and the creation of value along multiple axes. Contra Facebook’s claim to make the web more ‘social’, an investigation of commensuration brings to the fore the question how the social is accounted for in the first place.
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Conference Papers by Fernando van der Vlist
AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research (SPIR), 2020
Facebook’s application programming interfaces (APIs) enable third-party app developers to access ... more Facebook’s application programming interfaces (APIs) enable third-party app developers to access data and functionality and have become central to many of the platform’s ongoing data scandals and privacy concerns. Understanding how the platform and its APIs evolve and how it responds to issues requires looking closely and empirically at the evolution of access points, data structures, and graph data structures. The technicity of APIs is crucial for understanding the politics of data sharing and how APIs represent and structure phenomena and temporarily stabilise them. Instead of using APIs as an umbrella term for data retrieval, we conduct historical “technical fieldwork” for examining the evolving architecture and interfaces of Facebook’s web APIs. We contribute an in-depth technical and empirical perspective on the evolution of Facebook’s Graph API since 2006, and how it evolved into one of the most significant web APIs and an integral part of contemporary advertising infrastructures and web development cultures. Our empirical historical analysis of Facebook’s Graph API is based on the entire corpus of available archived developer documentation held by the Internet Archive. As we show, key changes in the Graph API evolution are characterized by phases of experimentation, standardization, commercialization, and regulation. We provide a “scalable reading” of the evolution of Facebook’s Graph API which provides insights in how data and data flows are governed through changes in data structures and permissions. By considering the evolving structures of APIs and individual data objects, we may develop further empirically informed critiques of platforms, APIs, and their data.
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Social media platform–industry partnerships are essential to understanding the politics and econo... more Social media platform–industry partnerships are essential to understanding the politics and economics of social data circulating among platforms and third parties. Using Facebook as a case study, this paper develops a novel methodology for empirically surveying the historical dynamics of social media industry partnerships and partner programs. Facebook is particularly emblematic as one of the few dominant actors that functions both as data aggregator and as digital marketing platform whilst operating a multiplicity of dedicated partner programs that cater to a wide array of industry partners. We employ mixed methods by aligning digital historical research and interview methods: using “digital methods”, we reconstruct both ongoing and former declared platform–industry partnerships and programs with web data whilst conducting semi-structured interviews with selected platform partners to contextualize the empirical research. This enables us to address (i) the dynamic relations between social media platforms and industry partners, (ii) their diversification by catering to a growing number of stakeholders with distinct interests, and (iii) their gradual entrenchment as dominant actors within an emerging digital marketing ecosystem. By tracing how and when partnerships and industry alliances are forged, sustained, and terminated over time we are able to develop a critical account of the political economy of social data that addresses the politics of platforms and stakeholders as well as the consolidation of platform power.
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Articles by Fernando van der Vlist
Conference Papers by Fernando van der Vlist
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.
The Platform as Ecosystem explains how not merely the platforms themselves but especially their larger ‘ecosystems’ are important for understanding the unique features of platform governance and power. Platform ecosystems have become the dominant technological, organisational, and governance model for digital platforms over the past fifteen years. These ecosystems comprise many different types of users including end-consumers, software developers, marketers and advertisers, and business partners who build software tools, products, and services of their own ‘on top’ of the interfaces provided and controlled by leading platforms. These users each help build and expand platform ecosystems while negotiating governance and control by central platforms.
This dissertation examines different aspects of platform ecosystems to determine how platforms’ material foundations or infrastructures relate to governance and power. It develops several novel empirical and historical approaches for studying the distinct material and relational features of digital platform ecosystems. This reveals how platforms derive considerable power from their ecosystems and provides unique empirical and historical insights into the technological, organisational, and evolutionary features of platform (and mobile app) ecosystems. These approaches and insights are relevant to digital media and platform researchers and help policymakers, regulators, and authorities worldwide dealing with the challenges of governing digital economies and societies.