Since the rise of the smartphone, apps have become entrenched in billions of users' daily lives. Accessible across phones and tablets, watches and wearables, connected cars, sensors, and cities, they are an inescapable feature of our current culture. In this book, Gerard Goggin provides a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the development of apps as a digital media technology. Covering the technological, social, cultural, and policy dynamics of apps, Goggin ultimately considers what a post-app world might look like. He argues that apps represent a pivowtal moment in the development of digital media, acting as a hinge between the visions and realities of the “mobile,” “cyber,” and “online” societies envisaged since the late 1980s and the imaginaries and materialities of the digital societies that emerged from 2010. Apps offer frames, construct tools, and constitute “small worlds” for users to reorient themselves in digital media settings. This fascinating book will reframe the conversation about the software that underwrites our digital worlds. It is essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as for anyone interested in this ubiquitous technology.
Оглавление
Gerard Goggin. Apps
Table of Contents
List of Tables
Guide
Pages
Series Title. Digital Media and Society Series
Apps. From Mobile Phones to Digital Lives
Copyright Page
Abbreviations and Acronyms
Tables
Acknowledgments
chapter one Introduction
The Apps Pivot in Digital Media and Society
Thinking about Apps
Overview
chapter two What’s an App?
Anatomy of an App
Histories of Apps
Apps in the Smartphone Moment
Conclusion: “There’s an App for That”
chapter three App Economy
What Are Apps Worth?
What Are the Most Popular and Profitable Apps?
The Global App Order
The App Store: Ruling the Roost
China’s App Store Exceptionalism
Beyond the App Store: Stand-Alone Apps
Mini apps
Super apps
Conclusion
chapter four App Media
Game Apps
Locative Media
Realities Media: Virtual, Augmented, (Re)Mixed
Apps and Digital Visualities
Moving Image Media
Sound Media
Message Media
Quotidian Voice Media
Conclusion
chapter five Social Laboratories of Apps
Health and Well-Being Apps
Apps and Money
Shopping Apps
Dating and Hookup Apps
Conclusion
chapter six After Apps
What Do We Know about Apps?
Living With/out Apps
Governing and Reimagining Apps
References
Index
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gerard goggin
3.2 Top 10 apps worldwide, by downloads, 2015 and 2020
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Chapter 3, “App Economy,” lays out the fundamental elements we need if we wish to understand global app economies, industries, and systems of value and control. I seek to establish apps as eminently international media technologies in their economic, industrial, and power structures. While it often seems that the key players are Apple, Google, and others that are headquartered in North America, Europe, or the United Kingdom, apps are very much a global, regional, local, and international phenomenon. I follow the story of the economics, politics, and forms of apps by interrogating the striking transformations wrought in recent years by the rise of other regions and countries that challenge the dominance of the western app stores and tech companies. After exploring China’s app stores and app market, I move to a discussion of how that country and various other Asian markets are innovating to create new forms and business models for apps in the form of mini apps and super apps—forms and models that promise to lessen consumer and business reliance on the “bottleneck” infrastructure of the app store.
In chapter 4, “App Media,” we change the pace and focus on apps as media. In particular, I consider the ways in which apps reshape the boundaries of how we regard and experience media. With their flexibility, ductility, and indispensable role in the weaving of contemporary networked digital media, apps break new ground and open up new modes for us to make things, connect, create meaning, forge social action, engage in our cultures, and mediate. I look at apps as a multimedia and multimodal computational software, which operates as a kind of modern-day kaleidoscope. In relatively quick succession, I discuss app media as contributing to, being constituted by, and in various and often connected forms partaking in games media, locative media, realities media (virtual, augmented, mixed), photo and image apps and app visualities, moving image media, sound media, message media, and something I call “quotidian voice media.”
