Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps

Snapchat. WhatsApp. Ashley Madison. Fitbit. Tinder. Periscope. How do we make sense of how apps like these-and thousands of others-have embedded themselves into our daily routines, permeating the background of ordinary life and standing at-the-ready to be used on our smartphones and tablets? When we look at any single app, it's hard to imagine how such a small piece of software could be particularly notable. But if we look at a collection of them, we see a bigger picture that reveals how the quotidian activities apps encompass are far from banal: connecting with friends (and strangers and enemies), sharing memories (and personally identifying information), making art (and trash), navigating spaces (and reshaping places in the process). While the sheer number of apps is overwhelming, as are the range of activities they address, each one offers an opportunity for us to seek out meaning in the mundane. Appified is the first scholarly volume to examine individual apps within the wider historical and cultural context of media and cultural studies scholarship, attuned to issues of politics and power, identity and the everyday.

Computers & Technology

Murray, Sarah

Morris, Jeremy Wade

Graphics & Design

University of Michigan Press

Snapchat. WhatsApp. Ashley Madison. Fitbit. Tinder. Periscope. How do we make sense of how apps like these-and thousands of others-have embedded themselves into our daily routines, permeating the background of ordinary life and standing at-the-ready to be used on our smartphones and tablets? When we look at any single app, it's hard to imagine how such a small piece of software could be particularly notable. But if we look at a collection of them, we see a bigger picture that reveals how the quotidian activities apps encompass are far from banal: connecting with friends (and strangers and enemies), sharing memories (and personally identifying information), making art (and trash), navigating spaces (and reshaping places in the process). While the sheer number of apps is overwhelming, as are the range of activities they address, each one offers an opportunity for us to seek out meaning in the mundane. Appified is the first scholarly volume to examine individual apps within the wider historical and cultural context of media and cultural studies scholarship, attuned to issues of politics and power, identity and the everyday.

Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture

Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture documents the transition of recorded music on CDs to music as digital files on computers. More than two decades after the first digital music files began circulating in online archives and playing through new software media players, we have yet to fully internalize the cultural and aesthetic consequences of these shifts. Tracing the emergence of what Jeremy Wade Morris calls the “digital music commodity,” Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture considers how a conflicted assemblage of technologies, users, and industries helped reformat popular music’s meanings and uses. Through case studies of five key technologies—Winamp, metadata, Napster, iTunes, and cloud computing—this book explores how music listeners gradually came to understand computers and digital files as suitable replacements for their stereos and CD. Morris connects industrial production, popular culture, technology, and commerce in a narrative involving the aesthetics of music and computers, and the labor of producers and everyday users, as well as the value that listeners make and take from digital objects and cultural goods. Above all, Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture is a sounding out of music’s encounters with the interfaces, metadata, and algorithms of digital culture and of why the shifting form of the music commodity matters for the music and other media we love.

Business & Money

Economics

University of California Press

Podcasting burst onto the media landscape in the early 2000s. At the time, there were hopes it might&nbsp;usher in a new wave of amateur and professional cultural production and represent an alternate model for how to produce, share, circulate, and experience new voices and perspectives. Twenty years later,&nbsp;podcasting is at a critical juncture in its relatively young history: a moment where the early ideals of open standards and platform-neutral distribution are giving way to services that prioritize lean-back listening and monetizable media experiences.&nbsp; &nbsp; This book&nbsp;provides an accessible and comprehensive account of one of digital media's most vibrant formats. Focusing on the historical changes shaping podcasts as a media format, the book explores the&nbsp;industrial, technological, and cultural components of podcasting alongside case studies of various podcasts, industry publications, and streaming audio platforms (e.g. Spotify, Google, and Apple Podcasts).&nbsp;Jeremy Wade Morris&nbsp;argues&nbsp;that&nbsp;as streaming platforms push to make podcasting more industrialized, accessible, user-friendly, and similar to other audio media like music or audiobooks, they threaten&nbsp;podcasting's early, though always unrealized, promises. This is the go-to introduction for students and researchers of media, communication, and cultural studies, as well as readers who enjoy making and listening to podcasts.

Podcasting (Digital Media and Society)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Polity

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Books by Morris, Jeremy Wade