The Appscape Method: Approaching mobile datafication from an infrastructural user perspective

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Smartphones are by now an integral part of most people’s everyday lives. However, the data collection methods of mobile apps as well as the distribution and use of mobile metadata is still far from common knowledge to users and scholars (for exceptions see Atkinson et al., 2015; Binns et al., 2018). While user studies have looked into people’s ‘algorithmic imaginaries’ (Bucher, 2017) and have identified a ‘privacy paradox’ separating users’ opinions from their actions (Barth & Jong, 2017), few studies have mapped how data actually flow from individual users’ smartphones (Lai & Flensburg, 2020a; Weltevrede & Jansen, 2019). This paper therefore introduces the concept of an appscape and develops what we will call the appscape method aimed at mapping the infrastructural tenets of mobile datafication (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013; van Dijck, 2014) from the perspectives of individual users. As such, it contributes to the emergent field of app studies (Dieter et al., 2019; Gerlitz et al., 2019) by offering a novel empirical approach to understanding app intrusiveness at the intersection between user studies (Ytre-Arne & Das, 2019) and infrastructure studies (Sandvig, 2013).
Original languageEnglish
Publication date20 Aug 2021
Publication statusPublished - 20 Aug 2021
EventNordmedia Conference 2021 - University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland
Duration: 18 Aug 202120 Aug 2021
https://nordmedianetwork.org/nordmedia-conference-2021/

Conference

ConferenceNordmedia Conference 2021
LocationUniversity of Iceland
CountryIceland
CityReykjavik
Period18/08/202120/08/2021
Internet address

ID: 276904432