Esther Weltevrede
Biographic Data
| ID | 222909 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Esther Weltevrede |
| GIVEN NAMES | Esther |
| FAMILY NAME | Weltevrede |
| SIGNATURE | WELTEVREDE E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5276-297X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 185 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Exploring Appification
This panel offers a reflection on the evolution and transformations of apps and app studies over the past decade, emphasizing how apps have seamlessly integrated into our daily routines and shaped our cultural and economic landscape. This process, known as ‘appification’, involves integrating various aspects of daily life and activities into mobile applications, fundamentally altering how we communicate, access information, make payments, and use…
Super-appification: Conglomeration in the global digital economy
Super apps’ are on the rise. This study explores the characteristics, origins, and manifestations of these apps worldwide, presenting the concept of ‘super-appification’ to describe processes of conglomeration in the global digital economy. Super apps aim to become deeply integrated into people’s everyday lives, capturing and monetising essential activities. By analysing 41 super apps, we identify four distinct types of ‘super-app constellations’…
Authenticity Governance and the Market for Social Media Engagements: The Shaping of Disinformation at the Peripheries of Platform Ecosystems
Social media engagements, such as likes and follows, have become crucial for driving algorithmic recommendations and underpinning platform economies. This has given rise to disinformation industries that focus on the production and sale of engagements, including Instagram followers-a phenomenon we term the 'engagement as a service' market. However, this market poses significant challenges for empirical research as its operations remain obscured f…
Super-Appification: Conglomeration in the Mobile Ecosystem
“Super apps” are on the rise and gaining popularity worldwide, especially in Southeast Asia, India and Africa. These are “do-everything apps” that offer a wide range of services in a single interface, making them more integrated into people's lives. Super apps thus highlight the organisation, political economy and geopolitics of the platformisation process in the app economy. While most studies on super apps focus on Chinese and Southeast Asian a…
Pandemic platform governance: Mapping the global ecosystem of Covid-19 response apps
This article provides an exploratory systematic mapping of the global ecosystem of COVID-19 pandemic response apps. After considering policy updates by Google Play's and Apple's App Store, we analyse all the available response apps in July 2020; their different response types; the apps' developers and geographical distribution; the ecosystem's ' generativity' and developers' responsiveness during the unfolding pandemic; the apps' discursive posit…
What happens to ANT, and its emphasis on the socio-material grounding of the social, in digital sociology
Data-intensive platform media bring up, but also reconfigure the question of the socio-material grounding of the social. This chapter explores how recent engagements with platforms and digital sociology do more than just vindicate ANT’s outlook of a flat socio-material account of the social without inbuilt levels of ‘micro’ and ‘macro.’ It argues that social media platforms reconfigure who or what can count as an actor, what counts as social and …
Multi-Situated App Studies: Methods and Propositions
This article discusses methodological approaches to app studies, focusing on their embeddedness and situatedness within multiple infrastructural settings. Our approach involves close attention to the multivalent affordances of apps as software packages, particularly their capacity to enter into diverse groupings and relations depending on different infrastructural situations. The changing situations they evoke and participate in, accordingly, mak…
Platform affordances and data practices: The value of dispute on Wikipedia
In this paper we introduce the device perspective as a methodological contribution to platform studies. Through an engagement with debates about the notion of affordances, which focus on the relation between the technical and the social, we put forward an approach to study the production of data within platforms by engaging with the material properties of platforms as well as their interpretation and deployment by various types of users. As a cas…
The Politics of Real-time: A Device Perspective on Social Media Platforms and Search Engines
This paper enquires into the politics of real-time in online media. It suggests that real-time cannot be accounted for as a universal temporal frame in which events happen, but explores the making of real-time from a device perspective focusing on the temporalities of platforms. Based on an empirical study exploring the pace at which various online media produce new content, we trace the different rhythms, patterns or tempos created by the interp…
Scraping the Social: Issues in Live Social Research
What makes scraping methodologically interesting for social and cultural research?This paper seeks to contribute to debates about digital social research by exploring how a 'medium-specific' technique for online data capture may be rendered analytically productive for social research.As a device that is currently being imported into social research, scraping has the capacity to re-structure social research, and this in at least two ways.Firstly, …
Where do bloggers blog? Platform transitions within the historical Dutch blogosphere
The blogosphere has played an instrumental role in the transition and the evolution of linking technologies and practices. This research traces and maps historical changes in the Dutch blogosphere and the interconnections between blogs, which — traditionally considered — turn a set of blogs into a blogosphere. This paper will discuss the definition of the blogosphere by asking who the actors are which make up the blogosphere through its interconn…
Scraping the Social: Issues in Live Social Research
What makes scraping methodologically interesting for social and cultural research?This paper seeks to contribute to debates about digital social research by exploring how a 'medium-specific' technique for online data capture may be rendered analytically productive for social research.As a device that is currently being imported into social research, scraping has the capacity to re-structure social research, and this in at least two ways.Firstly, …
The Politics of Real-time: A Device Perspective on Social Media Platforms and Search Engines
This paper enquires into the politics of real-time in online media. It suggests that real-time cannot be accounted for as a universal temporal frame in which events happen, but explores the making of real-time from a device perspective focusing on the temporalities of platforms. Based on an empirical study exploring the pace at which various online media produce new content, we trace the different rhythms, patterns or tempos created by the interp…
Multi-Situated App Studies: Methods and Propositions
This article discusses methodological approaches to app studies, focusing on their embeddedness and situatedness within multiple infrastructural settings. Our approach involves close attention to the multivalent affordances of apps as software packages, particularly their capacity to enter into diverse groupings and relations depending on different infrastructural situations. The changing situations they evoke and participate in, accordingly, mak…
Platform affordances and data practices: The value of dispute on Wikipedia
In this paper we introduce the device perspective as a methodological contribution to platform studies. Through an engagement with debates about the notion of affordances, which focus on the relation between the technical and the social, we put forward an approach to study the production of data within platforms by engaging with the material properties of platforms as well as their interpretation and deployment by various types of users. As a cas…
Super-appification: Conglomeration in the global digital economy
Super apps’ are on the rise. This study explores the characteristics, origins, and manifestations of these apps worldwide, presenting the concept of ‘super-appification’ to describe processes of conglomeration in the global digital economy. Super apps aim to become deeply integrated into people’s everyday lives, capturing and monetising essential activities. By analysing 41 super apps, we identify four distinct types of ‘super-app constellations’…
Authenticity Governance and the Market for Social Media Engagements: The Shaping of Disinformation at the Peripheries of Platform Ecosystems
Social media engagements, such as likes and follows, have become crucial for driving algorithmic recommendations and underpinning platform economies. This has given rise to disinformation industries that focus on the production and sale of engagements, including Instagram followers-a phenomenon we term the 'engagement as a service' market. However, this market poses significant challenges for empirical research as its operations remain obscured f…
Where do bloggers blog? Platform transitions within the historical Dutch blogosphere
The blogosphere has played an instrumental role in the transition and the evolution of linking technologies and practices. This research traces and maps historical changes in the Dutch blogosphere and the interconnections between blogs, which — traditionally considered — turn a set of blogs into a blogosphere. This paper will discuss the definition of the blogosphere by asking who the actors are which make up the blogosphere through its interconn…
Scraping the Social: Issues in Live Social Research
What makes scraping methodologically interesting for social and cultural research?This paper seeks to contribute to debates about digital social research by exploring how a 'medium-specific' technique for online data capture may be rendered analytically productive for social research.As a device that is currently being imported into social research, scraping has the capacity to re-structure social research, and this in at least two ways.Firstly, …
The Politics of Real-time: A Device Perspective on Social Media Platforms and Search Engines
This paper enquires into the politics of real-time in online media. It suggests that real-time cannot be accounted for as a universal temporal frame in which events happen, but explores the making of real-time from a device perspective focusing on the temporalities of platforms. Based on an empirical study exploring the pace at which various online media produce new content, we trace the different rhythms, patterns or tempos created by the interp…
Platform affordances and data practices: The value of dispute on Wikipedia
In this paper we introduce the device perspective as a methodological contribution to platform studies. Through an engagement with debates about the notion of affordances, which focus on the relation between the technical and the social, we put forward an approach to study the production of data within platforms by engaging with the material properties of platforms as well as their interpretation and deployment by various types of users. As a cas…
What happens to ANT, and its emphasis on the socio-material grounding of the social, in digital sociology
Data-intensive platform media bring up, but also reconfigure the question of the socio-material grounding of the social. This chapter explores how recent engagements with platforms and digital sociology do more than just vindicate ANT’s outlook of a flat socio-material account of the social without inbuilt levels of ‘micro’ and ‘macro.’ It argues that social media platforms reconfigure who or what can count as an actor, what counts as social and …
Multi-Situated App Studies: Methods and Propositions
This article discusses methodological approaches to app studies, focusing on their embeddedness and situatedness within multiple infrastructural settings. Our approach involves close attention to the multivalent affordances of apps as software packages, particularly their capacity to enter into diverse groupings and relations depending on different infrastructural situations. The changing situations they evoke and participate in, accordingly, mak…
Pandemic platform governance: Mapping the global ecosystem of Covid-19 response apps
This article provides an exploratory systematic mapping of the global ecosystem of COVID-19 pandemic response apps. After considering policy updates by Google Play's and Apple's App Store, we analyse all the available response apps in July 2020; their different response types; the apps' developers and geographical distribution; the ecosystem's ' generativity' and developers' responsiveness during the unfolding pandemic; the apps' discursive posit…
Super-Appification: Conglomeration in the Mobile Ecosystem
“Super apps” are on the rise and gaining popularity worldwide, especially in Southeast Asia, India and Africa. These are “do-everything apps” that offer a wide range of services in a single interface, making them more integrated into people's lives. Super apps thus highlight the organisation, political economy and geopolitics of the platformisation process in the app economy. While most studies on super apps focus on Chinese and Southeast Asian a…
Super-appification: Conglomeration in the global digital economy
Super apps’ are on the rise. This study explores the characteristics, origins, and manifestations of these apps worldwide, presenting the concept of ‘super-appification’ to describe processes of conglomeration in the global digital economy. Super apps aim to become deeply integrated into people’s everyday lives, capturing and monetising essential activities. By analysing 41 super apps, we identify four distinct types of ‘super-app constellations’…
Authenticity Governance and the Market for Social Media Engagements: The Shaping of Disinformation at the Peripheries of Platform Ecosystems
Social media engagements, such as likes and follows, have become crucial for driving algorithmic recommendations and underpinning platform economies. This has given rise to disinformation industries that focus on the production and sale of engagements, including Instagram followers-a phenomenon we term the 'engagement as a service' market. However, this market poses significant challenges for empirical research as its operations remain obscured f…
Exploring Appification
This panel offers a reflection on the evolution and transformations of apps and app studies over the past decade, emphasizing how apps have seamlessly integrated into our daily routines and shaped our cultural and economic landscape. This process, known as ‘appification’, involves integrating various aspects of daily life and activities into mobile applications, fundamentally altering how we communicate, access information, make payments, and use…
Computer Science (6 works) · World Wide Web (6 works) · Political science (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Business (4 works) · Data science (4 works) · Social media (4 works) · Artificial Intelligence (3 works) · Social Media and Politics (3 works) · Affordance (2 works)