Special Issue of Computational Culture on “Apps and Infrastructures”

We are very excited to announce the launch of the special issue of Computational Culture on “Apps and Infrastructures” (open access🔓), edited by Carolin Gerlitz, Anne Helmond, David Nieborg, and Fernando van der Vlist (alphabetical). We also revamped the journal’s website!✨ http://computationalculture.net/issue-seven/

The special issue includes nine articles that challenge how we conceive and study mobile apps and app stores, third-party app development, app–platform relations, app data flows, data markets, and walkthrough methods.

Articles

• In “Apps and Infrastructures – a Research Agenda”, the special issue editorial, Carolin Gerlitz, Anne Helmond, David Nieborg, and Fernando van der Vlist (alphabetical) introduce a research agenda for app studies that focuses on the relations between apps and infrastructures.
• In “App-ed Out: Logics of Success and Failure in App Stores”, Jeremy Wade Morris and Austin Morris investigate how rhetorics of success and logic of failure have become central to app store infrastructures and how failure is economically generative and rhetorically valuable in the app ecosystem.
• In “Regramming the Platform: Infrastructural Relations between Apps and Social Media”, Carolin Gerlitz, Anne Helmond, Fernando van der Vlist, and Esther Weltevrede (alphabetical) advance an empirical approach for examining the infrastructural relations between apps, app stores, and social media platforms, providing a critique of programmability and innovation.
• In “Dating Apps and Data Markets: A Political Economy of Communication Approach”, Rowan Wilken, Jean Burgess, and Kath Albury unravel the financial arrangements, business models, and data-sharing deals of dating apps to understand how economic value is attributed to and extracted from dating app data.
• In “Infrastructures of Intimate Data: Mapping the Inbound and Outbound Data Flows of Dating Apps”, Esther Weltevrede and Fieke Jansen advance a walkthrough method for empirically mapping the inbound and outbound flow of data in mobile dating apps and beyond.
• In “Policing through Platform”, Stacy Wood examines how policing practice, record-keeping, interface, and technological infrastructure co-constitute imaginaries around police work with a case study of the Axon platform.
• In “Less Mutable, More Mobile: The Role of Twitter Apps in the History of the Retweet Button”, Johannes Paßmann traces the central role of third-party Twitter apps in the pre-history of the retweet, providing insight into Twitter’s development as an information circulation infrastructure.
• In “Infrastructure of Vision: Envisioning the Future through Market Devices”, Théo Lepage-Richer delves into Snapchat’s business plans, patents, and technological functions to reflect on the logic and infrastructure of perception and capture in the app economy.

Read more: http://computationalculture.net/issue-seven/ (open access)

Funding

Parts of this work were supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under Grant DFG-SFB-1187; and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) under Grants 275-45-005 and 275-45-009.