App-centric mobile media and commoditization: Implications for the future of the open Web
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper traces linkages between the commoditization of the Web and what we call “app-centric media.” By this we mean a media environment composed of a multitude of discrete-but-connected software applications and their associated protocols, platforms, frameworks, and institutions. The rapid growth of app-centric media, we argue, is directly dependent on the development and commercialization of the (mobile) Internet, as well as on the business models embedded in the development of key native app platforms such as iOS and Android. The emergence of app-centric media, particularly in relation to mobile media, is having a marked effect on conceptualizations of the Web. The prevailing rhetoric concerning the development of the mobile Internet and app-centric media employs imagery of autonomy, empowerment, and independence for both the users and producers of apps. We argue that the commoditization central to the commercial development of the mobile Internet evidences a fusion of neoliberal rhetoric valorizing worker autonomy, individual empowerment, and entrepreneurial independence, with a mode of production consonant with “cognitive capitalism” (Dyer-Witheford, 2014; Vercellone, 2007). Our analysis is divided into three sections. The first looks at the early development of the mobile Internet in relation to the accumulation strategies of cognitive capitalism including the structural importance of “value networks” and the “putting-out system”; the second deals with the commercialization models underpinning the two dominant app platforms, Apple’s iOS and Android; the third addresses the development of HTML as a means of production and describes how HTML5 is framed as a prospectively more “open” competitor to the existing platform duopoly. It concludes by briefly examining the development of the Firefox OS mobile platform—and whether this platform resists or incorporates the forms of commoditization associated with app-centric media generally.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it