Selected Papers of AoIR 2016:
The 17th Annual Conference of the
Association of Internet Researchers
Berlin, Germany / 5-8 October 2016
APP STUDIES: PLATFORM RULES AND METHODOLOGICAL
CHALLENGES
Panel overview
The panel engages with conceptual and methodological challenges within a specific
area of ‘internet rules’, namely the space of mobile apps. Whereas the web was set out
to function as a ‘generative’ and open technology facilitating the production of
unanticipated services and applications, the growing popularity of social media
platforms, and mobile apps is characterised by proprietary services that facilitate
accessibility but obstruct transparency, tinkering, adjustment, and repurposing. This
broader development from ‘generative’ technologies to ‘tethered’ devices and services
has been referred to as ‘appliancization’ by Jonathan Zittrain (2008). In addition to
Zittrain’s focus on the proliferation of proprietary technologies, we suggest that platform
infrastructures create specific conditions for the emergence of app ecologies and that
apps and platforms are mutually dependent on a technological and economic level.
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 (DyerWitheford 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
Suggested Citation (APA): Gerlitz, C., Helmond, A., van der Vlist, F.N. & Weltevrede, E. (2016, October
5-8). App studies: Platform rules and methodological challenges . Paper presented at AoIR 2016: The 17th
Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers. Berlin, Germany: AoIR. Retrieved from
http://spir.aoir.org.
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.
References
Dyer-Witheford N (2014) App Worker. In: Miller PD and Matviyenko S (eds), The
Imaginary App, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 127–142.
Humphreys L (2007) Mobile social networks and social practice: A case study of
Dodgeball. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1): 341–360.
Matviyenko S, Ticineto Clough P and Galloway AR (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.
McVeigh-Schultz J and Baym NK (2015) Thinking of You: Vernacular Affordance in the
Context of the Microsocial Relationship App, Couple. Social Media + Society 1(2):
2056305115604649.
Wilken R and Bayliss P (2015) Locating Foursquare: The Political Economics of Mobile
Social Software. In: Wilken R and Goggin G (eds), Locative Media, New York:
Routledge, pp. 177–192.
Zittrain J (2009) The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Selected Papers of AoIR 2016:
The 17th Annual Conference of the
Association of Internet Researchers
Berlin, Germany / 5-8 October 2016
1. APP ECOLOGIES: MAPPING APPS AND THEIR SUPPORT
NETWORKS
Carolin Gerlitz
University of Siegen, Germany
Anne Helmond
University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Fernando van der Vlist
University of Siegen, Germany/University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Esther Weltevrede
University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
(All authors listed in alphabetical order)
This paper offers a contribution to app studies by approaching apps through the lens of,
and in dialogue with, platform studies. In the majority of contributions to studying apps,
their front-end interfaces and affordances (McVeigh-Schultz and Baym 2015), their
political economy (Goldsmith 2014; Dyer-Witheford 2014; Wilken and Bayliss 2015),
their affective and sensory capacities (Matviyenko et al. 2015) or app-based labour
(Dyer-Witheford 2014; Gregg 2015) have been discussed, whereas the wider ecologies
and economies of data within which apps thrive and interfere have received little
attention. However, a growing number of apps have been built to repurpose existing
social media data, devices or features as these platforms facilitate such repurposing by
offering their data and functionality to developers via public Application Programming
Interfaces (Bucher 2013). In the context of Twitter for instance, the majority of tweets is
no longer produced within the Twitter web end-user interface, but are issued through a
proliferating array of Twitter clients, alternative access points, tweet automators, crosssyndication apps, and games connected to Twitter accounts, to name only a few (Gerlitz
& Rieder 2014). This paper thus sets out to explore the entanglements between
platforms and apps by devising a novel method to empirically study app ecologies by
repurposing the calculative and ordering capacities of app stores. It advances a strand
of empirical app studies which considers apps not as discrete media objects, but as
relational objects situated in larger data ecologies.
Suggested Citation (APA): Gerlitz, C., Helmond, A., van der Vlist, F.N. & Weltevrede, E. (2016, October
5-8). App ecologies: Mapping apps and their support network s . Paper presented at AoIR 2016: The 17th
Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers. Berlin, Germany: AoIR. Retrieved from
http://spir.aoir.org.
Platforms, features, and apps
Platforms are often approached in two ways. Some researchers consider platforms in
terms of their capacities to be built upon (Bogost & Montfort 2009), as well as the ways
in which platforms enable and constrain how their features can be implemented and
how their data can be retrieved and recombined (Helmond 2015). A second strand
attends to the politics embedded in managing the various relations platforms enter with
their users, advertising clients, and developers amongst others (Gillespie 2010). These
stakeholders pursue different objectives and the role of the platform is to negotiate
these potentially conflicting interests whilst pursuing their own. Central to both strands is
the fact that platform data is both pre-structured and adjustable to multiple use contexts.
Users can only interact on a platform through a structured set of standardised activities,
or to draw on Agre’s (1994) ‘grammars of action’, which enables platforms to make their
data data amenable for constant recombination and to make external web data ‘platform
ready’ (Helmond 2015). However, the standardisation of platform activities (e.g. liking,
sharing, tweeting, and tagging) does not entail a standardisation in meaning and
intention, as platforms cannot fully control how users or third-party apps built on top of
platforms, interpret or deploy their pre-structured actions. The focus of this paper is the
extent to which apps tap into and deploy the ‘interpretative flexibility’ (Pinch & Bijker
1984; Van Dijck 2012) of platforms and their features – and whether their interpretations
align or misalign with those of the platforms themselves.
Methodology
This paper advances the field of digital methods for app studies by making use of the
capacities of app stores to organise apps and their relations to each other. We focus on
the Google Play Store mainly because of its size with 1.6 million Android apps (Statista
2015) and proceed in two steps. First, we map and explore apps that have been built on
top of major web-based and app-based platforms – specifically Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, Snapchat, Periscope and Tinder – and the relations between them. We
explore which platform features these apps support, what user practices they advocate,
and whether they advocate new or existing interpretations of these platforms. This
approach limits itself to apps that support platforms and their specific features but
acknowledges the existence of other software and devices that may redeploy and
reinterpret platform data. In the context of Twitter, our initial findings show an appsupport space that is mainly comprised of third-party clients that offer alternative access
points. In contrast, the Instagram support space consists of apps for follower building,
strategic hashtag use, and for using the platform for dating purposes. Additionally, we
examine how these app ecologies have evolved over time and in response to (or not)
major changes in platform features. Second, we map and explore apps that repurpose
platform features, focusing both on the platform-specific grammars of action (e.g.
retweets, mentions) as well as those that exist across multiple platforms (e.g. likes,
shares, followers, hashtags). We examine to which extent third-party apps redeploy and
reinterpret these platform features. Initial results indicate both a proliferating field of
interpretations and redeployment as well as the sharing of features across platforms.
This raises questions concerning the cross-platform deployment of likes, followers, and
hashtags, and how this might undermine or alter platform-specific use practices.
Towards app ecology studies
The paper concludes with a reflection on apps as situated in dynamic and complex
ecologies. Exploring the mutual entanglements and dependencies between platforms
and apps, it strives to offer both a methodological approach to map such ecologies and
to account for the specific entanglements between apps and platforms. It aims to show
how apps thrive and capitalise on platforms and in doing so also inform the practices
and interpretations proliferating on these platforms. Apps, platforms, and their
associated use practices emerge as a dynamic assemblage, a perspective that calls for
extending platform studies to take into account the app ecologies around them, as well
as for advancing app studies by considering apps as situated and ecological entities.
References
Agre PE (1994) Surveillance and capture: Two models of privacy. The Information
Society 10(2): 101–127.
Bogost I and Montfort N (2009) Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers. In:
Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, University of California, Irvine.
Available from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/01r0k9br.pdf (accessed 2 September
2012).
Bucher T (2013) Objects of Intense Feeling: The Case of the Twitter API. Computational
Culture 3. Available from: http://computationalculture.net/article/objects-of-intensefeeling-the-case-of-the-twitter-api (accessed 6 May 2014).
Van Dijck J (2011) Tracing Twitter: The rise of a microblogging platform. International
Journal of Media & Cultural Politics 7(3): 333–348.
Dyer-Witheford N (2014) App Worker. In: Miller PD and Matviyenko S (eds), The
Imaginary App, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 127–142.
Gerlitz, C., & Rieder, B. (2014). Tweets are not created equal. Intersecting devices in
the 1% sample. Presented at the IR15: Boundaries and Intersections, Daegu, South
Korea.
Gillespie T (2010) The politics of ‘platforms’. New Media & Society 12(3): 347–364.
Gregg M (2015) Hack for good: Speculative labour, app development and the burden of
austerity. The Fibreculture Journal (25): 185–202.
Helmond, A. (2015). The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready.
Social Media + Society, 1(2). http://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080
Matviyenko S, Ticineto Clough P and Galloway AR (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.
Pinch TJ and Bijker WE (1984) The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: or How
the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology might Benefit Each Other.
Social Studies of Science, 14(3): 399–441.
Statista (2015) Number of apps available in leading app stores as of July 2015 (2015)
Statista. Available from: http://www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-appsavailable-in-leading-app-stores/ (accessed 23 February 2016).
Selected Papers of AoIR 2016:
The 17th Annual Conference of the
Association of Internet Researchers
Berlin, Germany / 5-8 October 2016
2. FACEBOOK IN THE APP ECONOMY: FROM WEB TO APP(S)
Anne Helmond
University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
David Nieborg
University of Toronto, Canada
(All authors listed in alphabetical order)
In recent years, Facebook has become a dominant player in the growing mobile app
economy. With its suite of mobile apps, consisting of Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp
and Instagram, it occupied the top four of the most downloaded apps of 2015 worldwide
in the iOS and Google Play app stores combined (App Annie, 2016). In February 2016,
Facebook hinted at integrating ads into Messenger and announced Canvas, a new
platform for creating fast-loading interactive mobile ads, as part of its mobile
monetization efforts (Facebook for Business, 2016). In this paper we examine the
evolution of Facebook’s business model in the age of mobile media and investigate how
changes in Facebook’s advertising strategies have been reflected in their suite of
mobile apps. We operationalise this inquiry by proposing a methodological contribution
to the emerging field of app studies by combining a critical political economic approach
to Facebook with methods from software and platform studies.
Facebook’s evolution in the app (advertising) economy
The history of Facebook, often framed either as a Silicon Valley start-up or as an
emerging social network site, has been well-documented (e.g. boyd and Ellison, 2007;
Brügger, 2015; Goggin, 2014). We aim to build on this body of work by studying the
evolution of Facebook’s platform in the wider app economy. In 2007, around the same
time of Apple’s launch of the iPhone, Facebook started its transformation from a webbased service into a mobile-first enterprise (Goggin, 2014: 4). Yet, at the time, the
mobile ecosystem, and the mobile advertising ecosystem in particular, was still
considered a “sleeper advertising medium,” kept back by a lack of bandwidth,
fragmented hardware (Wilken and Sinclair, 2009), and the absence of technologies that
allowed advertisers to track and target mobile users. Since then the industry has
evolved and grown tremendously and in January 2016 more than 1.44 billion users
visited Facebook’s mobile apps, generating 80%, or US$4.5 billion, of the company’s
advertising revenue, (Facebook, 2016).
Suggested Citation (APA): Helmond, A. & Nieborg, D. (2016, October 5-8). Facebook in the app
economy: From web to app(s). Paper presented at AoIR 2016: The 17th Annual Meeting of the
Association of Internet Researchers. Berlin, Germany: AoIR. Retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org.
Critical political economy meets software and platform studies
Critical scholars have shown considerable interest in social media platforms (Fuchs,
2014), either by critically engaging with the issue of privacy and surveillance (Cohen,
2008), or by drawing on Smythe’s (1977) notion of the “audience commodity” to debate
the extent to which social media usage constitutes a form of “immaterial labor” (e.g.
McGuigan and Manzerolle, 2014; Fisher, 2015). While such critical interventions offer
an important counterweight against the utopian and one-sided rhetoric of social media’s
business manifestos (Van Dijck & Nieborg, 2009), the aforementioned studies pay less
attention to the technological dimensions of platforms. We aim to contribute such a
technical sensitivity by connecting two bodies of theory that so far have seen little
synergy: critical political economic studies of social media and software and platform
studies.
Software studies analyzes the relation between software and culture (Fuller 2008), and
in the case of software platforms such as Facebook, the related field of platform studies
connects the technical specificity of platforms as computational infrastructures to culture
(Bogost and Montfort 2009). This entails analyzing its end-user facing interface (i.e.
front-end, the website, apps, and their features), as well as its developer facing interface
(i.e. back-end, the Facebook APIs and SDKs). By doing so, we consider Facebook’s
infrastructural model in tandem with its underlying economic model (Helmond 2015) as
a way to investigate its “platform politics” (Gillespie 2010). Notwithstanding the ways in
which Facebook users constantly (re)negotiate their position within “the ecosystem of
connective media” (Van Dijck 2013), we are primarily interested in the interaction
between Facebook’s business model vis-à-vis its evolution as a technological platform.
Method
Political economic analysis is conducted, first, via a financial analysis of Facebook’s
mandatory Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, and, second, via a
textual analysis of Facebook’s quarterly investor calls outlining high-level managerial
strategies (Facebook, 2016). Studying the technological development of Facebook’s
app suite, however, poses methodological challenges as app stores do not offer
historical versions of apps, and platforms constantly update their own platform
documentation. Inspired by Ankerson’s software studies approach to writing histories of
the web (2009), in this paper we make use of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to
uncover Facebook’s historical platform documentation to analyze its development as a
computational software platform via its archived developer documentation in conjunction
with its evolution as an advertising platform via its archived advertising documentation.
Taken together, the proposed mixed-method approach moves beyond a genealogy of
Facebook as a company and instead studies the transformation of Facebook’s platform
with a focus on its mobile products (i.e. apps) in tandem with its underlying business
model.
Discussion
Facebook’s app suite is in various stages of development and we expect to find
differences in the ways individual apps, or “products” as Facebook calls them, are
“monetized”. As noted by Van Dijck, Facebook first facilitates “connectivity” (2013), as a
starting point for the commodification of sociality and data. In this paper we trace this
process over time by critically and empirically inquiring into Facebook’s transformation
as a mobile software platform.
References
Ankerson MS (2009) Historicizing Web Design: Software. Style, and the Look of the
Web. In: Staiger J and Hake S (eds), Convergence, Media, History, New York, NY:
Routledge, pp. 192–203.
App Annie (2016) App Annie 2015 Retrospective. App Annie Blog. Available from:
http://blog.appannie.com/app-annie-2015-retrospective/ (accessed 21 January 2016).
boyd d and Ellison N (2008) Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1): 210–230.
Brügger N (2015) A Brief History of Facebook as a Media text: The Development of an
Empty Structure. First Monday 20(5). Available from:
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5423 (accessed 8 December 2015).
Cohen NS (2008) The Valorization of Surveillance: Towards a Political Economy of
Facebook. Democratic Communiqué 22(1): 5–22.
Facebook for Business (2016) Introducing Canvas: Bring Your Brand and Product to
Life on Mobile. Facebook for Business. Available from:
https://www.facebook.com/business/news/introducing-canvas (accessed 27 February
2016).
Facebook Inc. (2016) Facebook Q4-15 and Full Year 2015 Earnings Conference Call.
Available from: http://investor.fb.com/results.cfm (accessed 27 January 2016).
Fisher E (2015) Class Struggles in the Digital Frontier: Audience Labour Theory and
Social Media Users. Information, Communication & Society 18(9): 1108–1122.
Fuchs C (2014) Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage.
Fuller M (2008) Introduction, the Stuff of Software. In: Fuller M (ed.), Software studies: A
lexicon, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1–13.
Gillespie T (2010) The Politics of ‘Platforms’. New Media & Society 12(3): 347–364.
Goggin G (2014) Facebook’s Mobile Career. New Media & Society 16(7): 1068–1086.
McGuigan L and Manzerolle V (eds) (2014) The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age:
Revisiting a Critical Theory of Commercial Media. New York, NY: Peter Lang
Publishing.
Smythe DW (1977) Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism. Canadian Journal
of Political and Social Theory 1(3): 1–27.
Van Dijck J (2013) The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Van Dijck, J., & Nieborg, D. (2009). Wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of
Web 2.0 business manifestos. New Media & Society, 11(5), 855–874.
http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809105356
Wilken R and Sinclair J (2009) ‘Waiting for the Kiss of Life’ Mobile Media and
Advertising. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media
Technologies 15(4): 427–445.
Selected Papers of AoIR 2016:
The 17th Annual Conference of the
Association of Internet Researchers
Berlin, Germany / 5-8 October 2016
3. RETWEET BUTTONS BEFORE 2009: SYSTEMS AND PRACTICES
Johannes Paßmann
University of Siegen, Germany
The history of the retweet and its button has been utilised by various actors for many
different purposes. The company Twitter for instance established a narrative of the
retweet button as a “bottom-up innovation” in 2009, most likely to improve their position
in, or before, a possible copyright argument with third-party service Tweetmeme, which
also posed a threat as it had almost become bigger than Twitter itself. Another narrative
about Twitter’s history that is still in circulation is that retweeting as a practice (writing
“RT @username” and pasting the retweeted tweet) was established through the
protests around the Iranian presidential election in June 2009 (the so-called “green
revolution”). This narrative is diffuse enough to not being attributed to a specific author,
yet strong enough to remain prominent in the Twitter article on Wikipedia until today.
These two narratives—neither true nor a mere invention—have largely contributed to
Twitters image as “the good platform” in contrast to the story of the more top-down
Facebook or YouTube, as grassroots-medium, finding its shape through protests in the
orient, which makes its way back to the west as a post-colonial re-import. However,
there is more than just “a wrinkle in this story” as Alexander Halavais puts it (2014, 30).
In its endeavour to retrace the history of the retweet, this paper cannot detail its entire
history and therefore focuses on one specific aspect. Before Twitter introduced the
retweet button in November 2009, several retweet buttons had already been popularly
used on third-party platforms and Twitter clients, most prominently Tweetmeme’s
retweet button, which had been introduced in February 2009 (Paßmann, Boeschoten, &
Schäfer, 2014). But there were already other retweet buttons before 2009 that might not
only be “more important” for Twitter’s history (and a couple of other histories of events
making use of Twitter at that time), but also shed a new light on how media-practices
develop in an app ecology around platforms. This paper focusses on these early
retweet buttons, that have been “invented” in the German province of SchleswigHolstein (late 2007) and developed further in the English county of East Sussex (2008).
Most importantly, this history of early retweet buttons does not only demonstrate how
distributed Twitter’s app ecology was in its early years, but also how practices and
meanings can establish, unfold and transform (interpretatively flexible and stabile) on a
large scale. Here, the paper discusses its findings in the light of Marshall Sahlins’ (1981,
1985) notions of cultural practices and their relations to systems, that have later been
Suggested Citation (APA): Paßmann, J. (2016, October 5-8). Retweet buttons before 2009: Systems and
practices. Paper presented at AoIR 2016: The 17th Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet
Researchers. Berlin, Germany: AoIR. Retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org.
developed further by the historian William H. Sewell Jr. (2005). These concepts have a
long tradition in the history of Historiography and also in Anthropology (Ortner 1984,
Geertz 1973 and of course Sahlins, as mentioned) as well as in Sociology
(Parsons/Shils 1951, Parsons 1959)—to name only the most prominent positions.
Still, the case of the retweet button makes a fundamental difference here: Parsons,
Geertz and Ortner discussed these systems as cultural systems, whereas systems were
thought of as a cybernetic metaphor. Sahlins and Sewell thought of semiotic systems in
the sense of Ferdinand de Saussure, that are already a bit less metaphorical insofar as
these systems are institutionally organised as systems. In the case of Twitter, there is
not much left of the systems-metaphor, as its systems are cybernetic systems in a
technical sense again—in other words: the metaphor returns to its origin here.
This discourse marks the theoretical horizon towards which the development of
practices can be understood in its specificity, as the focus on systems enables a
paradoxical observation: technical systems do play a strong role in the development of
retweet practices, way more than the “bottom-up narrative” cares to admit: the retweet
has not developed as a “sheer practice” (whatever that is supposed to be...), but retweet
buttons as software have existed and widely been used before the first retweet has ever
been written in its later stabile shape “RT @username”. Still, the retweet practices in
these early years were (and still are today) way less organised into systems in the
sense of Parsons, Geertz, Sahlins and the rest.
To conclude—and here, the paper points to a paradox which shall be put up for
discussion—technical systems such as Twitter seem to be very successful in organising
practices into stabile forms, but very unsuccessful (and that, ultimately paradoxical,
makes up their popularity) in organising them in to systems of meaning. On the
contrary, their achievement seems to be to exactly not to close the interpretative
flexibility of use practices and their associated features (Pinch/Bijker 1987—a notion
that media scholar José van Dijck (2012) also alludes, when stating “[...] Twitter’s
meaning has not stabilized yet” (ibid.) or boyd et al. (2010) concluding that retweeting
“[...] has not yet stabilized as a practice”), but to preserve their flexibility in the long run;
i.e. precisely because its form is stabile and its meanings remain flexible. Or as William
H. Sewell puts it: “Part of what gives cultural practice its potency is the ability of actors
to play upon the multiple meanings of symbols—thereby redefining situations in ways
that they believe will favor their purposes” (Sewell 2005, 168).
References
boyd d, Golder S and Lotan G (2010) Tweet, tweet, retweet: Conversational aspects of
retweeting on twitter. In: System Sciences (HICSS), 2010 43rd Hawaii International
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Van Dijck J (2011) Tracing Twitter: The rise of a microblogging platform. International
Journal of Media & Cultural Politics 7(3): 333–348.
Geertz C (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Halavais A (2014) Structure of Twitter: Social and technical. In: Weller K, Bruns A,
Burgess J, et al. (eds), Twitter and Society, New York, NY: Peter Lang, pp. 29–42.
Ortner SB (1984) Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties. Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 26(1): 126-166.
Parsons T and Shils E, eds (1951) Toward a general theory of action. New York: Harper
& Row.
Parsons T (1959) The Social System. Glencoe: Free Press.
Paßmann, J., Boeschoten, T., & Schäfer, M. T. (2014). The Gift of the Gab. Retweets
cartels and gift economies on Twitter. In Twitter and Society (pp. 331–344). New York,
NY: Peter Lang.
Pinch T and Bijker WE (1987) The social construction of facts and artefacts: or how the
sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. In: Pinch
T, Bijker WE and Hughes TP (eds), The social construction of technological systems:
new directions in the sociology and history of technology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
pp. 17–50.
Sahlins M (1981) Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early
History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Sahlins M (1985) Islands of History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Sewell WH (2005). Logics of History. Social Theory and Social Transformation.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Selected Papers of AoIR 2016:
The 17th Annual Conference of the
Association of Internet Researchers
Berlin, Germany / 5-8 October 2016
4. WECHAT AND THE INTEGRATION OF ACTIVISM IN EVERYDAY
LIFE: TRACING INSTANT MESSAGING PRACTICES ON AIR
POLLUTION IN BEIJING
Jeroen de Kloet
University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Thomas Poell
University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Guohua Zeng
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China
Chinese citizens use WeChat (known as WeiXin in China) for everything: from booking
a show to making new friends, and from exchanging pornography to gossiping. The
popular Chinese mobile text and voice messaging service, with its 650 million active
users, has in a short time become an integral part of everyday life. Inevitably, the
exchanges through the service also touch on contentious issues, such as freedom of
speech, political and corporate corruption, and the rising levels of air pollution. This
paper explores how WeChat is used for contentious communication, and how it, in turn,
shapes this communication.
It specifically examines the practice of instant messaging on Beijing’s rampant air
pollution problem. Especially during heavy smog days, Beijing’s citizens use WeChat to
share and discuss air quality index statistics, pictures of smoggy skylines, and
information regarding the temporary shutdown of schools because of bad air quality.
When the highly discussed 2015 air pollution documentary Under the Dome was
published online, WeChat was one of the prime platforms through which the
documentary was circulated and discussed (Custer 2015).
These mobile-app-based instances of contentious communication are particularly
interesting in the light of current research on social media and activism, which suggests
that a more general integration of activism in everyday life is taking place (Poell, Kloet,
& Zeng, 2014; Bennett & Segerberg 2012; Papacharissi & de Fatima Oliveira 2012;
Valenzuela 2013). As social platforms are intensively used in personal exchanges about
a wide variety of topics, activism and protest become part of daily online conversation.
Furthermore, as these platforms enable immediate widespread content sharing, such
Suggested Citation (APA): de Kloet, J., Poell, T. & Zeng, G. (2016, October 5-8). WeChat and the
integration of activism in everyday life: Tracing instant messaging practices on air pollution in Beijing.
Paper presented at AoIR 2016: The 17th Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers.
Berlin, Germany: AoIR. Retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org.
daily chatter pervades and affects public communication at large. WeChat is an
interesting example of this trend because it is a very popular mobile app, which is
deeply integrated in daily practices. And, it is interesting because it is used for
contentious communication in China, a country characterised by far-reaching state
efforts to control online contention.
Data collection
As a mobile app that operates within a complex political and commercial environment,
WeChat poses major methodological challenges for the study of online contention.
WeChat’s business strategies and the Chinese state’s control efforts are deeply
inscribed into the application’s architecture, which affects how content circulates on the
platform and how it can be collected. The platform’s publicly available APIs are geared
towards enabling data exchanges with a broad range of other online services, including
major social media platforms such as Facebook and Tencent’s own QQ, as well as a
rapidly growing number of apps that use WeChat’s payment system. Thus, WeChat’s
APIs are geared towards integrating external apps into its platform, but are not set up to
facilitate the collection of public user data for research purposes. A second limitation is
that WeChat does not offer a search feature to find specific types of accounts or
messages, like those concerned with air pollution. Instead, relevant public accounts and
group chats are spread through online word-of-mouth. In the light of these challenges,
we have chosen to adopt an ethnographic approach. The paper reflects on the
limitations of this approach, which only provides a partial view of WeChat activity, as
well as on the ethics of collecting public social media data for research purposes.
Building on a network of local experts, six popular WeChat group chats have been
selected. These chats are each dominated by a specific group of Beijing inhabitants,
including artists, bicycling enthusiasts, and environmentalists. In typical WeChat
fashion, these users discuss a wide variety of topics, frequently touching on air
pollution. To observe the interaction in these chats and collect relevant material, two
researchers from our team have joined the six selected groups and have followed the
group activity on a daily basis for a period of six months. Subsequently, all public chat
messages (texts, photos, and videos) on the topic of air pollution have been examined
and categorised through emergent coding. In addition, the research draws on 15 semistructured interviews with active users from the selected groups.
Discussion
The analysis of this material suggests that as contentious personal and public
communication becomes inextricably entangled, the character of activist discourse
fundamentally transforms. As other authors have already observed, this discourse is
injected with humor, emotions, and gossip, and sex. And, it is thoroughly intermingled
with popular culture and intimate personal concerns. Our case study shows how on
heavy smog days, WeChat channels a steady stream of jokes, air-pollution-mask
selfies, before-and-after pictures, and funny photoshopped images. At the same time,
the examined group chats are spaces where users express their anxiety about rising
pollution levels.
The consequences of this intermingling of personal and public communication for the
dynamic of popular contestation in the Chinese context are highly ambiguous. On the
one hand, WeChat, with its billions of daily messages that circulate in sudden and
unpredictable ways, constitutes a potentially explosive and hard to control element in
Chinese public communication. Yet, on the other hand, it allows the state to
continuously track, monitor and silence contentious voices. Precisely because WeChat
accounts are tied to smartphones it becomes easier to determine a user’s identity and
GPS location. Censorship research shows that WeChat, like all other major Chinese
platforms, is certainly not exempt from systematic practices of keyword filtering (Ng
2015). These forms of surveillance and censorship, in turn, inform how self-expression
takes shape, resulting in different levels of self-censorship, given that users are well
aware of state monitoring practices.
References
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Custer C (2015). WeChat, Weibo ordered to crack down on viral pollution film ‘Under
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