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

Jill Walker Rettberg Jill.Walker.Rettberg at uib.no
Tue Mar 28 22:50:54 PDT 2017


I would imagine the global nature of the internet makes seasons less important for apps - and even for memes, Snapchat filters, the types of stories you see on BuzzFeed or Reddit.

Seasons and rituals are so different around the globe.

You do certainly see seasons in Snapchat filters, Facebook prompts etc, and usually US-centric seasons often with little cultural awareness of the seasons not being global. Thanksgiving, Black Friday, American Mothers/Fathers day, College graduation weekend, spring break, Memorial Day are all examples of holidays not celebrated globally or even in Europe, which in many ways is culturally close to the US (and in the northern hemisphere so seasonally aligned).

The silliest example of failed seasonal globalist I've seen was Snapchat sending out a Happy Fathers Day message to Norwegian users - on Norwegian MOTHERS day. Ha.

You're probably thinking more of which apps are marketed, though? Is there a way to download data from the App Stores over time to test this? You may be able to generate graphs from https://www.appannie.com/ as well.

Jill

Sent from my phone

On 28 Mar 2017, at 20:45, Ravindra Mohabeer <mohabeerlists at gmail.com<mailto:mohabeerlists at gmail.com>> wrote:

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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