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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In the 2010s, as chat apps became a primary mode of communication for many people across the world, WhatsApp quickly outpaced rival messaging apps and developed into a platform.
In this book, the authors provide a comprehensive account of WhatsApp’s global growth. Charting WhatsApp’s evolution from its founding in 2009 to the present day, they argue that WhatsApp has been transformed from a simple, ‘gimmickless’ app into a global communication platform. Understanding this development can shed light on the trajectory of Meta’s industrial development, and how digital economies and social media landscapes are evolving with the rise of ‘superapps’. This book explores how WhatsApp’s unique characteristics mediate new kinds of social and commercial transactions; how they pose new opportunities and challenges for platform regulation, civic participation and democracy; and how they give rise to new kinds of digital literacy as WhatsApp becomes integrated into everyday digital cultures across the globe.
Accessibly written, this book is an essential resource for students and scholars of digital media, cultural studies, and media and communications.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Figures and Tables
F
igures
T
ables
Acknowledgements
Introduction
WhatsApp as a platform
The importance of studying WhatsApp as a platform
Structure of the book
Notes
1 Why WhatsApp Matters
The appification of global culture
Origins and evolution
Competition and the rise of superapps
After Meta
Free Basics and digital colonialism
The monetization question
Conclusion
Notes
2 Platform Biography
Intimacy and ‘privacy-oriented’ features
The Group feature
Encryption
Shareability and broadcast features
Sharing plug-ins, the Forward function and Broadcast lists
Business-oriented features
The WhatsApp Business App
WhatsApp Business API
Conclusion
Notes
3 Everyday Uses of WhatsApp
Connectedness and disconnection
Family groups
Archetypical group behaviours
Strategies for managing groups and chats over time
Expressive content
Texting
Voice and video calls
Audio messages
Stickers and memes
Public display
Statuses and profile pictures
Conclusion
Notes
4 WhatsApp Publics
Activism
News organizations and journalism
Broadcasting on WhatsApp
Information disorder
Easy sharing, fast spread and encryption
Networks of trust and political manipulation
Automated bulk messaging
Audio messaging
Regulation
Conclusion
Notes
5 WhatsApp Business Model
WhatsApp’s quest for monetization
Paid messaging
Feeding Meta’s ad business
WhatsApp Pay
Business solutions – convenience or nuisance for everyday users?
WhatsApp as a business platform
Conclusion
Notes
6 WhatsApp Futures
The ‘next chapter’ for Meta
Less simple, reliable and private
Spammier but still sticky
WhatsApp as platform
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Figure 0.1:
WhatsApp official account tweet during the 2021 outage. Screenshot taken by Amel...
Figure 0.2:
Artist’s impression of WhatsApp’s chat groups. Art provided by Pho...
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1:
Artist’s impression of the landing page of WhatsApp’s business sol...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1:
Artist’s impression of “Good morning” messages and inspirat...
Figure 3.2:
Artist’s impression of a group chat interface showing a notification that...
Figure 3.3:
Artist’s impression of a sticker showing Jesus Christ with the accompanyi...
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1:
Photograph taken by Amelia (July, 2018) of an informant’s family group ch...
Figure 4.2:
Australian Government official Coronavirus WhatsApp channel. Screenshot taken by...
Figure 4.3:
Artist’s impression of advertisements on the open web selling registered ...
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1:
Artist’s impression of ‘Business Tools’ available on WhatsA...
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1:
Artist’s impression of WhatsApp’s landing page in January 2014 bas...
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1:
WhatsApp users by country 2023
Chapter 5
Table 5.1:
Growth of WhatsApp business users and customers, in numbers
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
Digital Media and Society Series
Nancy Baym,
Personal Connections in the Digital Age
, 2nd edition
Taina Bucher,
Mercedes Bunz and Graham Meikle,
The Internet of Things
Jean Burgess and Joshua Green,
YouTube
, 2nd edition
Mark Deuze,
Media Work
Andrew Dubber,
Radio in the Digital Age
Quinn DuPont,
Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains
Charles Ess,
Digital Media Ethics
, 3rd edition
Terry Flew,
Regulating Platforms
Jordan Frith,
Smartphones as Locative Media
Gerard Goggin,
Apps: From Mobile Phones to Digital Lives
Alexander Halavais,
Search Engine Society
, 2nd edition
Martin Hand,
Ubiquitous Photography
Robert Hassan,
The Information Society
Kylie Jarrett,
Digital Labor
Amelia Johns, Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, and Emma Baulch,
WhatsApp: From a one-to-one Messaging App to a Global Communication Platform
Tim Jordan,
Hacking
D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, Jing Zeng and Patrik Wikström,
TikTok: Creativity and Culture in Short Video
Graeme Kirkpatrick,
Computer Games and the Social Imaginary
Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin,
Leah A. Lievrouw,
Alternative and Activist New Media
, 2nd edition
Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner,
Mobile Communication
Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan,
Digital War Reporting
Nick Monaco and Samuel Woolley,
Bots
Dhiraj Murthy,
, 2nd edition
Zizi A. Papacharissi,
A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age
Julian Thomas, Rowan Wilken and Ellie Rennie,
Wi-Fi
Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry and Crystal Abidin,
tumblr
Jill Walker Rettberg,
Blogging
, 2nd edition
Patrik Wikström,
The Music Industry
, 3rd edition
From a one-to-one Messaging App to a Global Communication Platform
AMELIA JOHNS ARIADNA MATAMOROS-FERNÁNDEZ EMMA BAULCH
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Amelia Johns, Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, and Emma Baulch 2024
The right of Amelia Johns, Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, and Emma Baulch to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5052-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5053-1(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Figures and Tables
Figures
0.1 WhatsApp official account tweet during the 2021 outage
0.2 Artist’s impression of WhatsApp’s chat groups
2.1 Artist’s impression of the landing page of WhatsApp’s business solution
3.1 Artist’s impression of “Good morning” messages and inspirational quotes which circulate in family WhatsApp groups
3.2 Artist’s impression of a group chat interface showing a notification that a user has left the group
3.3 Artist’s impression of a sticker showing Jesus Christ with the accompanying sentence: “Jesus knows what your deleted message said”, and a sticker used to joke about messages that your group members ignore, which shows the double tick blue read receipt with the accompanying sentence: “your message was successfully ignored”
4.1 Photograph taken by Amelia (July, 2018) of an informant’s family group chat, and a chain mail message containing misinformation, which circulated prior to Malaysian 14th General Election.
4.2 Australian Government official Coronavirus WhatsApp channel
4.3 Artist’s impression of advertisements on the open web selling registered phone numbers to enable mass messaging on WhatsApp
5.1 Artist’s impression of ‘Business Tools’ available on WhatsApp for Business. In the ‘Business Tools’ section within the Business App, the option to advertise on Facebook and Instagram is prominent
6.1 Artist’s impression of WhatsApp’s landing page in January 2014 based on website stored by the Web Archive (https://web.archive.org/web/20140102070018/https://www.whatsapp.com/)
Tables
1.1 WhatsApp users by country 2023
5.1 Growth of WhatsApp business users and customers, in numbers
Acknowledgements
This book has its beginnings in a workshop held at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia in November 2018. Emma and Ariadna had discussed the idea of holding a workshop on WhatsApp when they worked together at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), and when Emma moved to Malaysia in mid-2018 she applied for funds to invite Amelia, who had been studying WhatsApp’s role in anti-government political organizing in Malaysia, as part of a post-doctoral appointment at Deakin University. Others who presented at the workshop included Natalie Pang and Pauline Leong, and we would like to thank these two scholars for their contributions. We also thank the School of Arts and Social Sciences for providing funds to support the workshop. The workshop resulted in a five-year collaboration between Emma, Amelia and Ariadna on various publications and projects studying WhatsApp, including this book.
Amelia would like to also extend very warm thanks to Deakin University for funding the three-year postdoctoral appointment that led to her collaboration with Emma and Ariadna. Deakin University offered seed grant funding towards her project examining digital citizenship and activism among Malaysian youth from 2016 to 2018. She would particularly like to thank Niki Cheong, who was her research assistant on the project, and with whom she has collaborated on several other projects and publications focused on WhatsApp in Malaysia. She would also like to thank colleagues and friends at University of Technology Sydney, where she is now located. Similarly, Ariadna would also like to express her gratitude to her colleagues, mentors and friends at QUT, and especially to the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) and Jean Burgess, for creating a nourishing and welcoming research community.
Soon after the workshop, we began work on a special issue on WhatsApp, which appeared in 2020 in the open access journal First Monday, titled ‘Ten years of WhatsApp: The role of chat apps in the formation and mobilisation of online publics’ (Baulch et al., 2020). We would like to thank contributors to that special issue for their interest in working with us. They include: Edgar Gómez Cruz and Ramaswami Harindranath, Stefania Milan and Sérgio Barbosa, Natalie Pang and Yue Ting Woo, Marcelo Santos, Magdalena Saldaña and Andrés Rosenberg, and Emiliano Treré. When WhatsApp changed its privacy settings in 2019, we published a commentary in The Conversation, titled ‘Becoming more like WhatsApp won’t solve Facebook’s woes – here’s why’. In the same year Natalie Pang invited us to contribute a chapter on messaging apps to the Research Handbook on Social Media and Society (Edward Elgar), co-edited by Natalie and Marko Skoric. The volume appeared in 2023, with our chapter titled ‘A survey of media and communications scholarship on messaging apps’. We thank Natalie and Marko for this opportunity. Also in 2019, with Fiona Suwana, Ariadna and Emma undertook a study of the use of WhatsApp in Indonesia’s general election campaign, which was published in New Media and Society in 2022. The paper was presented as part of a panel Amelia, Emma and Ariadna organized at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Brisbane in 2019. Subsequently, a member of the audience, Crystal Abidin, approached us to pitch a proposal for a book on WhatsApp to Polity’s Digital Media and Society series. Crystal, one of the authors of a book on Instagram published in the same series in 2020, had been asked by series editor Mary Savigar to suggest names of scholars who could write such a book. We had our first meeting with Mary in October 2019, and, scattered across three different locations, began to slowly draft the book to completion over a two-year period. We thank Mary for patiently and persistently guiding us through this process, and the anonymous reviewers for contributing valuable feedback to several drafts. We thank Crystal for recommending us to Mary.
We would like to also extend thanks to Gabriel Pereira for undertaking interviews with WhatsApp users in Malaysia for the book, and to Paul Byron, who read and provided feedback on the manuscript. We would also like to thank the illustrator of the book, Phoebe Tan, who turned around our late request for illustrations in an incredibly timely and professional manner.
Finally, we would like to give our gratitude to our friends and family. Without their support we would not be able to put in the long hours that go towards a book collaboration such as this, coordinated across time zones and busy lives. Amelia would especially like to thank her partner, Paulina, for her patience and love. Emma thanks her colleagues, friends and her daughter in Malaysia for making it such a comfortable place from which to produce scholarship. Finally, Ariadna would like to thank her partner, Àlex, for his love and encouragement. WhatsApp is part of our stories in many unique and fun ways. We are delighted to share these stories and those of users we interviewed.
Introduction
On Tuesday 5 October 2021, at 11.40am Eastern time, people around the world discovered that they could not access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – with all three of the Meta-owned platforms seeming to have been wiped from the internet. For many, who use these platforms as their main connection to friends, family, news and businesses around the world, this amounted to a social blackout. Users flocked to Twitter* to find out what had happened, as reported in the media and by Twitter’s official accounts who cheekily tweeted ‘Hello literally everyone’.1 Meta (formerly Facebook) executives were forced to explain the cause of the outage via their official accounts on Twitter, and reassure users that they were working on the problem. Rivals took the opportunity to respond with humour. In response to the tweet from WhatsApp’s official Twitter account, one user @mentioned Telegram and asked suggestively if the Russian-owned app was ‘single’, to which Telegram replied: ‘come over, the servers are up and my parents aren’t home’ (figure 0.1).
Figure 0.1: WhatsApp official account tweet during the 2021 outage. Screenshot taken by Amelia, 6 October, 2021.
But for all the playfulness, the outage posed serious questions. First, the difference in tone of tweets from WhatsApp users from around the world highlighted the uneven impact the outage had on the social lives of users, with an evident discrepancy between users in the Global South who shared stories of businesses and families disrupted, and those in the Global North. In many countries, WhatsApp has risen to become more than a one-to-one communication app, or a privacy-focused alternative to other social media platforms. With its low data usage and generous data plans, private and public group chats, media sharing and digital payment and business functions, it has been referred to as an essential communication ‘utility’ (Gajjala & Verma, 2018), whose ubiquity and embeddedness in the daily life of users becomes especially apparent when it breaks down.
Media reports further contextualized the uneven impact of the outage, with stories from Latin America and Africa speaking of more acute impacts than in North America and Europe, or Asian countries, where, due to time zone differences, the outage hit during the night (Zhong & Satariano, 2021). For the former, users experienced up to seven hours of lost business revenue (Waldron, 2021), doctors were unable to book appointments with patients (Talmazan, 2021) and large parts of an informal worker economy that operates through WhatsApp came to a grinding halt, resulting in groceries not being delivered, and taxis and ride shares being unable to operate (Froio, 2021). In Africa, where WhatsApp is so essential to daily life (Hassan & Hitchen, 2022) that, in some countries, you can use it to renew your car licence (Rall, 2022), conspiracy theories started to circulate that governments were blocking the platform. In Tanzania the scale of public panic was such that a government spokesperson took to Twitter to urge the public to ‘stay calm’ (Schwikowski, 2021). The outage showed how WhatsApp has become so integral to many people’s daily rhythms and interactions, that losing access to it feels like being locked out of social life.
In this book we argue that WhatsApp is more than a simple messaging app – it is a global communication and business platform that converges personal, public and commercial contexts. As a reader, when you think about WhatsApp, you might have in mind the simple WhatsApp mobile application for chatting with friends and family, which is easily downloaded from the app store. But in this book, we refer to WhatsApp as a platform. Our use of the term ‘platform’ conceptualizes WhatsApp as a complex technical system that brings together a number of different stakeholders: businesses, ordinary users, news organizations and public officials, for example. Nieborg and Helmond (2019) use the term ‘instances’ to refer to the different technical and economic components that allow companies like Meta to perform the ‘extraction, analysis and distribution of data [that] is central to [Meta’s] business model’ (p. 199). By focusing on the Messenger app as one of Meta’s ‘instances’, the authors demonstrate not only how Messenger evolved into a service that has platform properties of its own but also how it is a key component of Meta’s ‘platformization’ (Nieborg & Helmond, 2019, p. 202). On the one hand, Meta extends its boundaries into the web and mobile ecosystem via the development of social plug-ins and multiple apps. On the other hand, it opens up its programmable infrastructure to third-party developers and organizations so that they can create a presence for themselves within Meta’s family of platform ‘instances’ (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) (p. 202). In this process, Meta is able to turn user data (primarily of ordinary users) into a commodity form that is made available to other end-users (businesses, advertisers), which fuels the company’s growth (p. 197).
Nieborg and Helmond argue that studying Facebook Messenger can help us understand important elements of Meta’s industrial development. In this book, we do not limit our analysis to the role WhatsApp is playing in the ‘bigger’ story of Meta’s evolution. Rather, we centre our discussion on WhatsApp’s evolution as a platform in its own right, arguing that WhatsApp has acquired too much technical, economic and social weight to be accurately described as an ‘instance’ of Meta. WhatsApp’s evolution as a platform is not only shaped by its technological expansion (which we unpack in chapter 2), or by its economic and business dimensions (which we explore in chapters 1 and 5), but also by how users have adapted it in various ways in different parts of the word, which we describe in chapters 3 and 4. The social uses of WhatsApp and the elements of user agency that are inherent in them are of crucial importance to our understanding of WhatsApp’s place in media landscapes in the present, as well as its significance within histories of platform ecosystems and their evolution. For this reason, the book makes space for understanding not only how WhatsApp advances Meta’s business interests, but also its meanings for ordinary users, and how they may extend its possibilities. The book addresses the following research questions: How has WhatsApp evolved from a one-to-one chat app to a global communication and business platform? And why is it important to study WhatsApp as a platform?
To answer our research questions, we use tweets, media reports, corporate information and historical artefacts such as saved websites from the Internet Archive, as well as published scholarship. We also draw on interviews we have conducted with WhatsApp users in three countries where the platform has had a significant uptake: Malaysia, Indonesia and Spain.2 These sites were chosen because we have grown up in or lived in these places where WhatsApp use is ubiquitous, or have undertaken extensive research on WhatsApp communication practices in these sites. Ariadna is from Barcelona (Spain) and has been using WhatsApp since its early beginnings. For her, WhatsApp is the main communication platform she uses to stay in touch with family and friends. Amelia began using WhatsApp in 2016 while conducting fieldwork in Malaysia. She has since been embedded in activist groups on WhatsApp and has used it in her personal life, where it is the main way she communicates with her partner’s extended family in Mexico. Emma found her use of WhatsApp intensified after she moved to Malaysia in 2018. Then, it assumed the role of a family communication platform where she, her mother and siblings regularly update one another on their lives and share photos. It also became central to her social life in Malaysia: Emma participates in WhatsApp book club groups, hiking groups, tennis groups, meditation groups and neighbourhood groups. She uses it to chat with her Kuala Lumpur friends, organize dinners, outings and dates, as well as to book appointments with her accountant, her dentist, her masseuse and her psychotherapist.
WhatsApp as a platform
Our analytical framework for conceptualizing WhatsApp as a platform is organized into three parts. In its economic dimension, WhatsApp has evolved from a popular though largely unprofitable chat application to become a multi-sided market under Meta’s ownership, that facilitates interactions between ordinary users, businesses (e.g., small businesses, content producers), advertisers and institutions (governments, banks, political parties, media). Microeconomics theory and platform studies scholarship (Bucher, 2012; Gawer, 2014; Nieborg & Helmond, 2019; Rieder & Sire, 2014; Rochet & Tirole, 2003) consider how, by leveraging and monetizing exchanges between diverse end-users, technologies (and their business owners) are able to grow their user base exponentially, ‘capture’ new markets and consolidate media power (Nieborg & Helmond, 2019, p. 200).
One framing that may help us to understand how WhatsApp business solutions contribute to Meta’s economic growth is provided by Athique (2019). He argues that a contemporary phase of development in platform economies revolves around digital transactions for which platforms receive a commission. This refers to the way platforms extract value through the integration of mobile payments like QPay and e-wallets, adding a ‘layer’ of functionality that Athique (2019, p. 6) refers to as ‘transactional’. This evolution of WhatsApp into a business platform is consistent with Meta’s broader ambition to extend its media dominance beyond the web, into the mobile ecosystem (Goggin, 2014; Nieborg & Helmond, 2019). This will be the focus of chapters 1 and 5.
In its technical dimension, WhatsApp has undergone rapid transformation to facilitate interactions between these diverse end-users. By explaining WhatsApp’s technological expansion into the open web and the mobile ecosystem, we wish to challenge the conventional understanding of WhatsApp as simply a mobile chat app. Consistent with other platform studies scholars (Bodle, 2011; Burgess & Baym, 2020; Gerlitz & Helmond, 2013; Gillespie, 2018; Nieborg & Helmond, 2019), we focus on specific technological features to explain the evolution of technologies into platforms. For example, in the case of WhatsApp, its core mobile chat app is central to WhatsApp’s business model – after all, more than 2 billion users are active on the chatting app (see table 1.1, chapter 1). But WhatsApp also has other ‘app instances’ (Nieborg & Helmond, 2019, p. 199): the WhatsApp Desktop app, which people can download to their computers to chat without having to use their mobile phones, and a mobile app that targets small businesses – the WhatsApp Business App. Within WhatsApp’s ‘app ecosystem’ (Nieborg & Helmond, 2019, p. 197), the platform also offers a set of application programming interfaces3 (APIs) – such as the Business API, as well as plug-ins (e.g., WhatsApp Share Button, the Click to Chat Button), and software development kits4 (SDKs). Further, WhatsApp has various ‘web instances’ (Nieborg & Helmond, 2019, p. 199): its main website (whatsapp.com), a computer-based extension of the core mobile app – the WhatsApp Web (web.whatsapp.com), and a site to showcase its business products (business.whatsapp.com). Acknowledging this technological evolution (the focus of chapter 2) allows us to offer a holistic picture of WhatsApp as a platform.
Importantly, our conceptualization of WhatsApp as a platform also involves a social dimension. In the book we pay attention to the evolution of communication practices attached to WhatsApp, while also considering how WhatsApp enables and extends the ways people engage in social life. Scholars like Burgess and Baym (2020) and Gillespie (2018) suggest that media technologies grow or fail owing to the social participation and agency of users. Users commit their time and resources to produce the ‘communicative or expressive content’ that define platform cultures, and to debate, contest, resist or reinforce existing social norms (p. 17). As Gillespie claims, users ‘don’t simply walk the paths laid out by the … platforms. They push against them, swarm over them, and imbue them with new meanings’ (Gillespie, 2018, p. 23). By encouraging user appropriation WhatsApp has also invited illegal and harmful uses, prompting calls for action towards better regulation of platforms to limit the spread of harmful content. By focusing on these social dimensions, our book regards WhatsApp not just as a business or a technical architecture, but as an ‘intermediar[y] between content and users … and ultimately as media’ (Rieder & Sire, 2014, p. 202; see also Bucher, 2012; Gillespie, 2018).
Figure 0.2: Artist’s impression of WhatsApp’s chat groups. Art provided by Phoebe Tan.
Gómez Cruz and Harindranath (2020) use the concept ‘technology of life’ to ‘highlight the ways in which life is expanded, experienced, and has become increasingly dependent’ on WhatsApp in many countries of the Global South. For them, any analysis of WhatsApp should provide a contextual and historical analysis of how the platform is experienced by different groups in various geographic regions, which we offer in chapters 3 and 4. WhatsApp’s core mobile app’s unique design (e.g., groups, encryption) and affordances (e.g., simple interface, low data usage, free service), among other controversial commercial partnerships outlined in chapter 1, have facilitated its widespread uptake by diverse cohorts in countries such as India, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Kenya, South Africa, Italy and Spain. Some features introduced by WhatsApp, such as Group invite links, which allow users to publish links on the open web to encourage public discussions, have become hugely popular in countries like Brazil (Caetano et al., 2018), while remaining relatively unknown to users in other parts of the world. The uneven character of uptake points to the important role social context plays in shaping uses of WhatsApp and its design, and highlights the dynamic relationship users have with the platform as they seek to mould it to their social, political and business needs, as we show in chapters 2 and 4. In order to understand WhatsApp’s global spread and development as a platform, we consider how users in different cultural contexts have played an active part in making it relevant to those contexts and contributed to its technological evolution.
Note
*
Twitter was rebranded as X in July 2023. However, we decided to refer to X as Twitter throughout the book since this is the name the platform had at the time of writing.
