Читать книгу Apps - Gerard Goggin - Страница 10

In laying out the coordinates of apps, the book proceeds as follows.

In chapter 2, “What’s an App?,” I give a working definition of apps and look at the histories and important predecessors of apps that have shaped them today. I also outline the forms and functions of apps and their importance to contemporary media and society.

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.”

In chapter 5, “Social Laboratories of Apps,” I discuss the significant ways in which apps go well beyond the previous boundaries of media, spanning across the gamut of social realms. As I shall show, apps are framed and propelled by their actors to act as something of a laboratory of the social. They extend the qualities, the repertoire, and the immersive and catalytic role of digital media and communications, as this formerly specific and relatively enclosed area has scribbled over and redrawn the dividing lines between public and private spheres and has spurred new roles for and dependencies upon technology in our lives, other species, and our collective environments. The chapter focuses on four especially revealing areas, where apps have functioned as social laboratories of various kinds: health and well-being; money, especially payment systems, remittance and money transfer, banking, and FinTech apps; consumption, especially in the area of shopping apps; and relationships in the categories of dating and hookup apps.

In the concluding chapter 6, “After Apps,” I move to ideas of the future and discuss how apps function as a resource and a prompt for the imagining, planning, and politics of the future. What, for instance, is the anticipated and emerging role of apps as a golden thread in visions and plans of the Internet of Things, 5G networks, and next-generation AI-supported infrastructures and technology and social systems? An overarching thread in this chapter is the need to critically evaluate the kinds of claims and discourses in which apps feature, especially in order to better ground, understand, and reimagine the social futures and values that are inscribed in and through apps. I bring together the key arguments of the book, discussing the place of apps on the wider scene of digital media and society. As the chapter suggests, apps are but one area in a sprawling set of digital transformations. Yet critical attention to apps is key to our understanding of digital societies.