Pelle Snickars

Patrick Vonderau

Maria Eriksson

Rasmus Fleischer

Anna Johansson

An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience. Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of “teardown” from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood. Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online. Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's “front end” with experimental, covert investigations of its “back end.” The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.

Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music

Spotify Teardown

Per Strömbäck

Myten om internet

sagan om Spotify

Den svenska enhörningen

Jonas Andersson

Efter the Pirate Bay

Allt som kan digitaliseras kommer att digitaliseras. Allt, från hur vi roar oss på fritiden till hur vi löser komplexa samhällsproblem, kan reduceras till ettor och nollor. Internet är lösningen på, ja, allt. Eller? För samtidigt krisar mediehusen, vi har fått en digital underklass, skolan blir sämre och Facebook gör oss möjligen olyckliga. Alla är uppenbarligen inte digitala vinnare. Den samtida digitalismen påverkar oss alla oavsett om man är vinnare eller förlorare. Det är egentligen bara boktryckarkonsten som kan mäta sig med digitaliseringens mediala och kulturella genomslag. Vad är det egentligen som han hänt? Hur har det påverkat oss människor, när började det och vart leder det oss? Att vi lever i en revolutionerande tid är kanske en floskel men vår samtid är faktiskt annorlunda. Väldigt annorlunda. Pelle Snickars är professor i medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap vid Umeå universitet. Tidigare var han forskningschef på Kungliga biblioteket. Han skriver regelbundet om digitala frågor i Svenska Dagbladet.

Digitalism: När allting är internet

Presents a collection of essays that explore the implications that iPhones and other smartphones have on society, technology, media, and culture.

The IPhone and the Future of Media

Moving Data

The iPhone has revolutionized not only how people communicate but also how we consume and produce culture. Combining traditional and social media with mobile connectivity, smartphones have redefined and expanded the dimensions of everyday life, allowing individuals to personalize media as they move and process constant flows of data. Today, millions of consumers love and live by their iPhones, but what are the implications of its special technology on society, media, and culture? Featuring an eclectic mix of original essays, Moving Data explores the iPhone as technological prototype, lifestyle gadget, and platform for media creativity. Media experts, cultural critics, and scholars consider the device's newness and usability—even its "lickability"—and its "biographical" story. The book illuminates patterns of consumption; the fate of solitude against smartphone ubiquity; the economy of the App Store and its perceived "crisis of choice"; and the distance between the accessibility of digital information and the protocols governing its use. Alternating between critical and conceptual analyses, essays link the design of participatory media to the iPhone's technological features and sharing routines, and they follow the extent to which the pleasures of gesture-based interfaces are redefining media use and sensory experience. They also consider how user-led innovations, collaborative mapping, and creative empowerment are understood and reconciled through changes in mobile surveillance, personal rights, and prescriptive social software. Presenting a range of perspectives and arguments, this book reorients the practice and study of media critique.

The iPhone and the Future of Media

Pelle Snickars

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