Appified: Apps and the Mundane Software of Popular Culture

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Apps are the fastest growing part of the software industry, involving thousands of developers from hundreds of countries and global revenues exceeding $50 billion. Media researchers are well-versed in theories and methods for exploring how people make and take meaning from films, TV, and games, but the smaller, more mobile and everyday nature of apps has left their cultural significance largely unaddressed. This panel gathers work by scholars considering the impact of this new format by approaching apps as forms of mundane software: simple programs, limited in function, cheap or freely available and deployed during everyday routines (e.g., doing tasks, walking home, before bed, waiting). Yet how these programs are designed and applied, and the influence of their interfaces and features are far from mundane. Increasingly integrated into the everyday, apps take on logistical roles in shaping our sense of self, our sense of others, and our sense of the objects and spaces around us.

Collectively our panel asks: How do apps reconfigure the role software serves in everyday routines (e.g. personal safety, community interactions, daily tasks)? As apps take on serious and political modes of representation, protection and advocacy, what presumptions do app developers and marketplaces make in the production process and how do these decisions affect how users find, use and experience software? By studying a range of apps from a diversity of perspectives, all linked by the notion of everyday software, we consider the significance of this current moment when essential cultural products and communication practices are being appified. Jeremy Morris and Sarah Murray begin by framing the concept of mundane software and questioning the ideals and beliefs mobilized by various productivity apps. Carrie Rentschler looks at how the app Hollaback! models responses to street harassment and how it redefines the meaning, look and practice of collectivized self-defense against harassment. Sharif Mowlabocus considers the promises of increased safety made by the Sex Offender Tracker app and how it paradoxically reduces opportunities for community building and neighbourhood safety. Tarleton Gillespie concludes by examining the controversial gay conversion app, Exodus International, and what “banned” apps tell us about the role app stores play in mediating our experiences of software and as spaces of political contestation. Ultimately, this panel argues the study of media is increasingly the study of software and the study of media necessitates understanding the role of software’s newest format: the app.

Sub Unit

• Popular Communication

Cosponsor

• Communication and Technology

Chair

• Jeremy Wade Morris, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Individual Presentations

• Mundane Software and the Appification of Culture - Jeremy Wade Morris, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Sarah Anne Murray, U of Michigan

• Hollaback, Or How an App Models a Movement Against Street Harassment - Carrie Rentschler, McGill U

• Forewarned is Forearmed? Sex Offender Tracker Applications and the Individualizing of Risk - Sharif Mowlabocus, U of Sussex

• Apps, App Stores, and the Offer of Visibility: The Case of Exodus International - Tarleton L. Gillespie, Microsoft Research