Core Post #2 - Mahnoor

This week, though I’ll touch on all of the readings, I want to start with the epistemological (and methodological) arguments made by Parikka and Apperley. I am specifically interested in their claim that “it is necessary to have a more critical appreciation of ‘failure’”(359), emphasizing that it is important to analyze platforms that have failed in one way or another in addition to those which have succeeded. This emphasis is tied to their goal of using media archaeology (as well as media anarchaeology) to form “an explicitly articulated critical methodology” to study platforms (351). Media anarchaeology does not look “to the past or future” but seeks out multiple paths and possibilities, “evoking the speculative, alternative, minor, and even imaginary perspectives of media history” (360). This notion of anarchaeology, as well as Parikka and Apperly’s focus on failure, echo in aspects of theorist and visual artist Svetlana Boym’s articulation of “Off-Modern” thinking. I think bringing Boym into conversation with this week’s texts could be fruitful. Boym argues that a form of “lateral” looking across time, genre, and discipline is necessary to understand a world of shifting paradigms, cultural patterns, and new technologies:

“We need to interrupt the new cultural myths that naturalize the homepage and Facebook and that uncannily remind us of the dystopias of the early twentieth century. [...] A new pedagogy is needed to embarrass the digital totality. Off-moderns insist on thinking with error, play, ambiguity, human memory, crisscrossing digital and public space—just for a rainy day. Off-modern new media combines new digital platforms as well as critical reflection on the new forms of digital mediation that have been domesticated to the point of destroying our intimacies. Off-modern new media is about networking across different genres and mediums, reawakening senses and refining sensibilities, exploring diagonal and zigzag thinking and working on a new public architecture.” (Boym 23)

There is also something in Boym’s “lateral” looking that functions similarly to Gillespie’s crafting of a definitional constellation in order to both dissect individual meanings of the word "platform" and to explicate the ways in which these meanings are linked. Like Gillespie, Srnicek too analyzes the platform in its multiple forms. He does so within the category of “business model” (25). In order to grasp what roles platforms – as entities, corporations, websites – and "platforms" – as discursive and rhetorical tools – play in society, it is important to account and allow for ambiguity, multiplicity, and interchangeability, to define terms and then be okay with muddling those definitions in accordance with new circumstances. It is important to look beyond single definitions or ways of looking limited to one vector, to either “past or future”. 

The Parrika and Apperley reading, as well as the Boym text, tie into Anable’s advocacy for an approach to platform studies that recognizes platforms as “porous, queerly promiscuous, and radically leaky” (139). This porosity is also connected to the blurred boundaries between different conceptions of “the platform” in Gillespie’s analysis, though Anable perhaps articulates a more radical iteration of these boundaries. Van Dijck too speaks about the ways in which the relationship to technology is not a straightforward one: “Technology shapes sociality as much as sociality shapes technology”(146). She adds that this is a “process in which humans and machines have their own distinctive but mutually shaping roles”(146). I think using the word “distinctive” is interesting. As the boundaries between platforms are leaky and porous – as argued in Anable and implied in Gillespie’s intersecting definitional permutations of platform – and as those platforms themselves are subject to multiple creative vectors of analysis – as argued by Parikka – are the roles that humans and platforms play in relation to one another truly distinctive? That is, are the roles themselves more rigidly defined and delimited than the spaces in which these roles are meant to play out? Anable argues that imagining platforms as sealed black boxes leads to imagining “subjectivity, agency, race, and sexuality” as similarly sealed categories (137), which is why porosity becomes an important characteristic to assign to platforms and platform studies. Would imagining the roles of humans and machines as similarly porous help or hinder the scholarly confrontation of platform power dynamics related to race, gender, and sexuality? Though opening up the categories of digital platforms to ambiguity and leakiness can enable challenging structural power, reducing the "distinctiveness" between human and machine roles feels to me like verging into a realm of dystopic imaginings, perhaps exacerbating existing power struggles.

Boym, Svetlana. The Off-Modern. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.