App Imperialism: The Political Economy of the Canadian App Store. (June 2020)
- Record Type:
- Journal Article
- Title:
- App Imperialism: The Political Economy of the Canadian App Store. (June 2020)
- Main Title:
- App Imperialism: The Political Economy of the Canadian App Store
- Authors:
- Nieborg, David B.
Young, Chris J.
Joseph, Daniel - Abstract:
- To critically engage with the political economy of platformization, this article builds on the concepts of platform capitalism and platform imperialism to situate platforms within wider historical, economic, and spatial trajectories. To investigate if platformization leads to the geographical redistribution of capital and power, we draw on the Canadian instance of Apple's iOS App Store as a case study. App stores are situated in a complex ecosystem of markets, infrastructures, and governance models that the disparate fields of business studies, critical political economy of communications, and platform studies have begun to catalog. Through a combination of financial and institutional analysis, we ask if Canadian game app developers are effective in generating revenue within their own national App Store. Given Canada's vibrant game industry one would expect Canadian developers to have a sizable economic footprint in the burgeoning app economy. Our results, however, point toward the US digital dominance and, therefore, we suggest the notion of app imperialism to signal the continuation, if not reinforcement of existing instances of economic inequalities and imperialism.
- Is Part Of:
- Social media + society. Volume 6:Number 2(2020:Apr./Jun.)
- Journal:
- Social media + society
- Issue:
- Volume 6:Number 2(2020:Apr./Jun.)
- Issue Display:
- Volume 6, Issue 2 (2020)
- Year:
- 2020
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 2
- Issue Sort Value:
- 2020-0006-0002-0000
- Page Start:
- Page End:
- Publication Date:
- 2020-06
- Subjects:
- political economy -- app store -- platformization -- game industry -- financial analysis
Social media -- Periodicals
Social media -- Social aspects -- Periodicals
302.231 - Journal URLs:
- http://www.uk.sagepub.com/journals/Journal202332 ↗
http://www.uk.sagepub.com/home.nav ↗ - DOI:
- 10.1177/2056305120933293 ↗
- Languages:
- English
- ISSNs:
- 2056-3051
- Deposit Type:
- Legaldeposit
- View Content:
- Available online (eLD content is only available in our Reading Rooms) ↗
- Physical Locations:
- British Library DSC - BLDSS-3PM
British Library HMNTS - ELD Digital store - Ingest File:
- 13524.xml