In this article, we add research on technical integration and dependency to the theories of platformization. Our research seeks to understand how platforms have been able to technically integrate themselves into the fabric of the mobile ecosystem, transforming the economic dynamics that allow these largely enclosed entities to compete. We therefore want to consider platforms as service assemblages to account for the material ways in which they have decomposed and recomposed themselves for developers, enabling them to shift the economic dynamics of competition and monopolization in their favor. This article will argue that this shift in the formation of platform monopolies is being brought about by the decentralization of these services, leading to an overall technical integration of the largest digital platform such as Facebook and Google into the source code of almost all apps. We present new digital methodologies to surface these relations and material conditions of platforms. These methodologies offer us a whole new toolkit to investigate how decentralized services depend on each other and how new power relations are formed.
This paper builds on the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understanding and reclaiming the data that young people produce on smartphone devices. Here we explore the growing usage and centrality of mobiles in the lives of young people, questioning what data-making possibilities exist if users can either uncover and/or capture what data controllers such as Facebook monetize and share about themselves with third-parties. We outline the MobileMiner, an app we created to consider how gaining access to one’s own data not only augments the agency of the individual but of the collective user. Finally, we discuss the data making that transpired during our hackathon. Such interventions in the enclosed processes of datafication are meant as a preliminary investigation into the possibilities that arise when young people are given back the data which they are normally structurally precluded from accessing
In this short paper we discuss our work on coresearch devices with a young coder community, which help investigate big social data collected by mobile phones. The development was accompanied by focus groups and interviews on privacy attitudes and aims to explore how youth cultures are tracked in mobile phone data.
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