Platform studies and its methods [Rohan - core post #2]

This week’s readings featured different methodologies and epistemologies in pursuit of refining the emergent field of “platform studies”. Overall, I found many of the readings compelling and urgent because they demonstrate analytic strength without fetishizing either users or interfaces.

Anable builds on Apperly & Parikka’s critique that “platform studies” produces uniformity by prescribing a feminist intervention: tackling the presumed discreteness of platforms. For example, she draws on Chun’s and Friedland’s provocative assessments of “promiscuity” and “sluttiness” in how platforms treat data to illustrate how marketing rhetoric (e.g., “sharing economy”) produced by companies can be dangerous because it can obscure their sociocultural implications, as Gillespie discusses in detail. Thus, I agree with Anable, and by extension Apperly & Parikka and Gillespie, that platform studies’ material-discursive methods risk reinforcing a presentist stability by presupposing the object of study and relying on readymade empirical sites, such as interfaces and marketing material.

I found it peculiar, then, that van Dijck was not cited by those later works, because I found her use of actor-network theory compelling for analyzing platforms as techno-socio-cultural artifacts. She argues—with a more specific empirical focus than Anable or Apperly & Parikka, focusing on social media platforms—that the engineering of connectivity illustrates how platforms are not just intermediaries but rather actors that mediate sociocultural dynamics. (Perhaps as a response, Anable cites Nooney who seems to describe this approach as “simply rearranging actor-network deck chairs, envisioning histories and theories without corporeal or discursive bodies, histories or theories lost in their own love for the mechanism’s indifference to the body”; p. 136). However, different analysts apply ANT in different ways, and I thought van Dijck’s approach was fairly grounded.

Finally, I was most excited by Srnicek’s turn to the economics of platforms. While his particular approach is certainly subject to Anable’s critiques, I also found that his general conceptualization of platforms as economic actors lays bare the sociocultural stakes—for example, implications for labor and work. What I found most compelling is his typology of platforms—a level of both comprehensiveness and specificity that I found lacking in the other texts—that demonstrate the central role of data. This zooms out from the all too common focus on social media networks to include other platforms such as Amazon and GE (while excluding Apple as a consumer products company). This is an important intervention because a narrow discursive focus on Facebook and Google forecloses analytic opportunities by excluding empirical sites that don’t feature prominent interfaces and users—such as Amazon Web Services or non-tech-industry platforms that Srnicek discusses. Thus, I find platform capitalism compelling not necessarily for its methodological intervention in platform studies, but rather for its epistemic consequences for what constitutes a platform in the first place.