to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Tables
3.1 Top 10 apps of the 2010s, worldwide, by downloads and spend
3.2 Top 10 apps worldwide, by downloads, 2015 and 2020
3.3 Top 10 apps worldwide, by revenue, 2015 and 2020
3.4 Top 20 digital platform companies by market capitalization, 2020
3.5 Top 10 Android app stores in China, by monthly average users, 2020
5.1 Top 10 grossing dating apps worldwide by overall revenue, 2020
5.2 Top 9 dating apps in China, 2020
Acknowledgments
In this book I bring together ideas that I have garnered and mused upon since at least 2007–2008. That was the time when the smartphone took off, and subsequently apps have proliferated, spread, and become implacably installed at the center of contemporary digital infrastructures, which in turn now underpin many societies globally.
I am grateful for the rich body of work on mobile communication and media and for many conversations, exchanges, and critiques I have been fortunate to have from friends and colleagues in this field, which has come into existence in the early 00s. This book functions as the third volume in a series and takes up many of the concepts, technologies, and ideas I explored in Cell Phone Culture in 2006 and Global Mobile Media in 2011.
My thanks to Cherry Baylosis, Xu Wei Wei (apps in China), and Punit Jagasia (apps in India) for their research assistance. I am especially grateful to Rosemary Curtis for her peerless research advice and for the preparation and proofing of the manuscript.
I would like to acknowledge the support of the University of Sydney, especially through a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and DVC Research Compact Funding award for the project titled “Emerging Social Technology.” Earlier funding from the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre (SSEAC) for the research workshop “Social and Mobile Media in Southeast Asia” (co-convened with Lim Sun Sun) proved germinal, and I am grateful to its director, Professor Michele Ford, for this award.
The book was written after I took up a position at the superb Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. In a practical and government-of-the-self sense, the COVID-19 circuit breaker left me no option but to finish the book. The angle afforded by Singapore, an entrepôt and a global crossroads, has proved enormously helpful. My thanks to various colleagues, especially Rich Ling, and to the thoughtful and engaged students in my courses, “Global Media Issues and Policy” and “Digital Media Governance,” for many informative conversations.
It has been a pleasure to publish my first book with Polity. Sincere thanks to Mary Savigar for giving me the idea in the first place, for inviting me to consider it, for providing feedback, and for commissioning the project. I owe Ellen McDonald-Kramer a special debt of gratitude for her unstinting support and thoughtful advice through the process. Thanks to the reviewers for their helpful feedback.
Finally, thanks to my family, Bianca, Liam, and Jacqui, for their love, support, and interest especially during the close-quarter circuit breaker period of the COVID pandemic.
Gerard Goggin
Wee Kim Wee School of Information and Communication
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
March 2021
chapter one Introduction
On Saturday, June 20, 2020, US President Donald Trump was looking forward to a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which he had been widely publicizing via his Twitter account. Only a disappointing 6,200 supporters turned up, leaving many empty seats conspicuously vacant in a stadium with a capacity of 19,000. The shortfall was credited to a prank by TikTok users and K-pop fans, who apparently booked half a million tickets for the rally, causing rally organizers to wildly overestimate attendance (Andrews, 2020). While the exact nature of this digital activism success is tricky to pin down (Madison & Klang, 2020), there’s no doubt that this was an important moment of worldwide recognition of the influence of an app.
From mundane, everyday videos of teens idling and improvising, TikTok quickly established itself as major force in popular culture, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, gaining a reputation for its signature abbreviated, hilarious, and whip-smart videos. Like YouTube before it, TikTok gained a following across many countries. Rajiv Rao, contributor to the Indian tech blog ZDNet, sung its praises: “TikTok introduced India to everyday stars from small towns and villages, and across genders, classes, and castes” (Rao, 2020). TikTok’s vibrant base of users provided a platform to social activism, a high-water mark being the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, which exceeded 12 billion views in mid-2020, before the prank on Trump’s Tulsa event. Along the way, TikTok has been embroiled in considerable debate on its conservative and narrow norms of gender, race, class, and money—and hence on its contradictory role in reproducing and potentially supporting challenges to inequality and injustice (Kennedy, 2020).
Yet this flowering of cultural activity threatened to come juddering to a halt with India’s June 2020 ban on TikTok and on 58 other Chinese apps over data security concerns. Hot on the heels was Trump, with his August 2020 executive orders that blocked TikTok and WeChat from US app stores and processed transactions of US citizens, then required TikTok to be sold to US interest (or face a ban).
The spectacular career of TikTok shows us only one facet of the omnipresent media and of the cultural phenomenon that is apps. Many people around the world use apps in a myriad of ways—to go to sleep, wake up, plan and manage their daily routines and unexpected events, track and guide their bodies, engage in relationships, or negotiate food, work, health, finances, pleasures, aversions, annoyances, and many other aspects of personal, public, and social life. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–2021, apps have come even more to the fore, especially as a technology of choice, expectation, or—as with infectious disease—contact, tracking, and tracing and as a legal requirement and instrument of population and health surveillance and control.
The central argument of the book is that apps represent a pivotal sociotechnical development in a key phase of digital media development. You can see apps as the hinge between two stages of recent media and communication. On the one hand, there are the visions and realities of the mobile, cyber, and online societies, which people envisaged from the late 1980s through to the early 00s. On the other hand, there are the imaginaries and materialities of pervasive media and immersive digital societies, which emerged internationally in the 2010s and onwards, in all their different forms and inequalities.
Apps bring together mobile phones and the Internet; software, computational, data, and hardware developments; web technologies, including the mobile web and what was briefly called Web 2.0; locative technologies; wearable devices; and connected cars, homes, and other environments. Great numbers of users access social media via mobile apps; but the two things are different. Apps provide bridges across the messy ecologies of media, technology, environments, and bodies. Yet apps also represent a litmus test for the shortcomings, limits, edges, and inequalities of digital media’s diffusion and social functions. While apps can ease users’
