[Air-L] Question: Do 'apps' have 'seasons'?

Ravindra Mohabeer mohabeerlists at gmail.com
Tue Mar 28 11:45:37 PDT 2017


Hello All,

I find myself with a rather crudely formed idea through which I am questioning whether day-to-day ‘apps’ (or ‘Internet experiences’) taken in a broad interpretation exist in a temporal sense that can be described as ‘having seasons’?

If retailers have seasons (artificial or ‘real’) that reflect/create behavioural patterns - e.g. people tend to renovate in the Spring, buy certain things around certain holidays, etc. - do ‘apps' follow similar seasonal patterns? Or, coming from a media studies perspective I have noted an (admittedly anecdotal but) immense shift in how media seasons are defined, I wonder if any potential a-seaonality of the 'app world’ has upset temporal expectations of the seasonality of mediated experiences.

I mean seasons in both a climatic (i.e. spring, summer, fall, winter) and social sense (blockbuster, holiday, shopping, election, ‘back to school,’ new release, etc.) - and as an interplay of the climatic and social dimensions concurrently within the separate backdrop of ‘innovation cycles,’ release dates, and updates. 

Obviously there are time-limited ‘apps' (like contest apps or event-based apps), but I wonder whether there are ebbs and flows of general ‘app' use, particularly platform apps of the social media ilk, or of the organization/productivity type for example, that can be temporally described as seasonal? 

I realize that my terms of reference are rather imperfectly formed (app, season, etc.) but I did that on purpose since I am rather more interested in your interpretation/application to whatever related construct as it explores the changing nature of the concept of seasonality/temporality and [new] mediated experiences.

Just curious. Any thoughts?
Ravi

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Ravindra N. Mohabeer, PhD
Vancouver Island University
Nanaimo, BC  CANADA



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