‘Re-appropriating’ Facebook? Web API mashups as Collective Cultural Practice
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Stefan Werning
Abstract
In contemporary debates about socio-technical implications of software, the platform metaphor, the corresponding notions of architectures and ecosystems as well as the formatting of data to afford ‘platformization’ play a central role. This approach has certainly proven fruitful to assess the role of companies like Facebook in contemporary society. However, it characteristically overlooks the messiness of actual usage practices and those studies that do acknowledge the internal power struggles that subcutaneously shape platforms often take a top-down perspective, disregarding bottom-up processes of (re-) appropriation. To address this gap, the article outlines a method to study how users and semi-professional developers collectively frame the cultural imaginary of a platform by conducting a thoroughly comparative content analysis of mashups created using the Facebook Web API. The affordances of many individual mashups might be considered marginal; yet, the tool-assistant comparison allows for inferring common patterns of interpretation that characterize mashup creation as a mobile digital practice, which plays a key role in social media platform development.
© 2018 by transcript Verlag
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Content
- Introduction Mobile Digital Practices. Situating People, Things, and Data
- I. Field Research and Case Studies
- The MicroSDs of Solomon Islands An Offline Remittance Economy of Digital Multi-Media
- In the Footsteps of Smartphone-Users Traces of a Deferred Community in Ingress and Pokémon Go
- Digital Mediation, Soft Cabs, and Spatial Labour
- So ‘Hot’ Right Now Reflections on Virality and Sociality from Transnational Digital China
- Twitter in Place Examining Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Plaza through Social Media Activism
- Screen Screen Tourism
- Audiences, Aesthetics and Affordances Analysing Practices of Visual Communication on Social Media
- Mobile Mediated Visualities An Empirical Study of Visual Practices on Instagram
- ‘Re-appropriating’ Facebook? Web API mashups as Collective Cultural Practice
- II. Entering the Field
- Situating Hobby Drone Practices
- The Inchoate Field of Digital Offline A Reflection on Studying Mobile Media Practices of Digital Subalterns in India
- Mad Practices and Mobilities Bringing Voices to Digital Ethnography
- An Experimental Autoethnography of Mobile Freelancing
- III. In Conversation with …
- The Practice of Practice
- Biographical Notes
