Call for Papers. The World According to Apps

Thematic Issue: The World According to Apps

Guest Editor: Piotr Celiński (AGH University of Krakow)

In digital culture, software matters more than hardware. The situation resembles one of Borges’s stories, in which the map of an empire came to eclipse the territory itself. Mathematical logic, coding, algorithms, protocols, and the software built upon them establish the dominant paradigms of thought and agency. Immersed in interactions with the menus and interfaces of our operating systems, software environments, and social media platforms, we find that software is taking over, or has already taken over, control of cultural reality, displacing mechanization from this position [1].

This position of software has far-reaching consequences. The rules of code, databases, and processes are becoming, or have already become, the functional core of Western culture and the dominant grammar of its technical language [2]. They effectively colonize our sensibilities, possibilities, and communicative competences [3], and it is hardly surprising that today’s decisive cultural processes and conflicts unfold around precisely this dynamic. Digital control implemented by the “virtual class” [4], which manages the production of code and controls information flows, clashes with resistance from pirates, hackers, and activists. Free and open access to tools and data, collective intelligence, and cooperation across digital territories are effectively countered by bots, viruses, exploits, streams, data clouds, spam, disinformation, and AI hallucinations. Consumption and colonization confront grassroots creativity and interactive agency. Software environments have become key arenas in the struggle to retain agency (interacting) and avoid becoming a managed resource caught in the global vortex of data (interacted).

Against this backdrop, we invite critical reflection on what is perhaps the most dynamic area of the software landscape: apps and the cultural practices increasingly developing around them. We seek to encourage cultural analyses and critical theories of apps, drawing on perspectives from software studies, media studies, the sociology of culture, and cultural anthropology. We propose approaching apps as situated software [5], as environments and sets of communicative rules, and as sites in which cultural and social practices are embedded in multiple ways. Apps can also be understood as domains of informational exchange and transfer between the ecosystems of platforms, APIs, and network infrastructures, on the one hand, and interfaces, data, and user interactions, on the other. We also invite reflection on such conceptual proposals as mundane software, which describes the embedding of everyday practices in applications [6], and appification [7], which captures a new stage in the development of digital culture, in which AI-powered apps are taking the place once reserved for the anticipated social media revolution, as well as approaches that understand apps as thresholds and processes radically transforming social experience [8].

We propose addressing this broad topic through such keywords and thematic areas as:

·       algorithms and algorithmization, including artificial intelligence;

·       applications and software systems;

·       user experiences and practices related to software;

·       coding and programming as cultural and social practices;

·       interfaces and user experience;

·       download/upload, access, and the management of information flows;

·       digital processes and data processing; networks and interactions.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: February 28, 2027

Articles in Polish or English, of up to 20 pages in length, including the abstract and bibliography, should be submitted via the online platform of the journal Studia Humanistyczne AGH. Społeczeństwo. Kultura. Technologia:
https://journals.agh.edu.pl/human/en/instrukcja-zglaszania-tekstow

Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the journal’s editorial guidelines:
https://journals.agh.edu.pl/human/en/wytyczne-edytorskie

and using the journal’s manuscript template:
https://journals.agh.edu.pl/human/libraryFiles/downloadPublic/42

 

Bibliography

[1] Manovich, L., Software Takes Command (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).

[2] Fuller, M., Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software (New York: Autonomedia, 2003).

[3] Kroker, A., The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism: Heidegger, Marx, Nietzsche (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

[4] Kroker, A., Weinstein, M. A., The virtual class: Living in the information society (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).

[5] Dieter, M., Gerlitz, C., Helmond, A., et al., Multi-situated app studies : methods and propositions. Social Media + Society, 5 (2) (2019). doi:10.1177/2056305119846486 <https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119846486> ISSN 2056-3051.

[6] Morris, J. W., & Elkins, E., There’s a history for that: Apps and mundane software as commodity. The Fibreculture Journal, 25, 63–88 (2015). doi:10.15307/fcj.25.181.2015.

[7] Appification in the Age of AI: Exploring AI App Cultures and Economies (ASI Sprint Report Series No. 2), red. F. N. van der Vlist, E. Weltevrede, App Studies Initiative (ASI) (2025, May 28). DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/hv34x

[8] Galloway, A. R. The interface effect, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).