56. Government of / as / by App(s): mobile infrastructures and state power
Nafis Aziz Hasan, The University of Pennsylvania; Sandeep Mertia, New York University; Aakash Solanki
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês
Mobile Apps are relationally embedded in socio-technical practices that not only reproduce older connections but constitute new ones. They offer a different configuration of software architecture and re-arrange spatial and temporal dimensions of social life in new ways. Like other software, but far more intensely, apps both congeal and conceal power, labor, hierarchy, and inequity, in and through their democratic sheen.
How do apps emerge and circulate not just as dominant forms of products and services in the digital economy, but also that of the technological state and its relation with people? How does the logic of mobility and agility that characterize information on apps sit with the rigidity and hierarchy of power-vested institutions? States, for instance, are peripatetic but not mobile. Yet, the charisma of apps – that are often linked with other social media or messaging platforms such as WhatsApp – is making its mark on the state across the globe. India and China are among several examples, where state agencies make apps faster than they deliver public services. Yet, even as the affordances and immediacy of apps produce instant data, broken systems stalls the interpretive effects of big data. The panel will reflect on STS themes of governance and public policy with digital infrastructures and their effects on the network of relations that constitute state power.
