The Platform Multiple - Will Core Post 1

This weeks readings on platforms look at the social, cultural, political and technological entanglements of these artifacts. Particularly, these readings problematise the multiplicity of platforms, as the promises of tech corporations, as the definitions of the term, as the actors enrolled in their social production and as the varied and distributed experiences of their use.

To begin with, Van Dijck's highlights how platforms bring human and non-human actors into relation. I appreciated the clear distinction between 'users' and usage to recognise the shaping power of both the social and the technical in creating the eventual use cases of technologies: "Human and technical agents, rather than being hierarchically ordered entities, are mutually intertwined in determining a platform’s usage." While of course being a clear application of ANT, I thought that this may have been strengthened by looking at the affordances of the platforms themselves. Usages may be encouraged or discouraged by platforms materiality, but workarounds exist (such as Angela's fake persona). I also wonder how these usages and perceptions of platforms are temporally situated. Today, we are aware that people may not be as they appear on platforms (thanks, Catfish), even with policies such as Facebook's real name/real id policy.

By looking at the multiple implications of the term, Gillespie notes how corporations are able to deploy the term to safeguard their own political and economic strategy. The term 'platform' benefits certain stakeholders and constructs the visage of corporations as neutral facilitators rather than actors in their own right: "These are efforts not only to sell, convince, persuade, protect, triumph or condemn, but to make claims about what these technologies are and are not, and what should and should not be expected of them." More than a decade later, corporations still attempt to find this balance between claims of neutrality and condemnation of egregious harms or disinformation.   

The multiplicity of platforms was also evident though Srnicek's platform capitalism. I found this piece useful for thinking though platforms primarily as profit generating machines: "The simple wager of the book is that we can learn a lot about major tech companies by taking them to be economic actors within a capitalist mode of production." This piece was particularly useful for thinking though multiple kinds of platforms, the distinctions between which are flattened through the use of the term. This is particularly useful giving the increasing dominance of platforms, beyond just social media interactions, to highlight the multiple actors the platforms can bring into relation. I appreciated how Srnicek problematised what is actually novel about platforms, and moreover, how these claims of novelty can obscure traditional forms of power or well established dynamics between human and non-human actors.

The ambiguity of platforms continued with Anable, who notes the variegated experiences with platforms. "Rather than being discrete objects, platforms, and the ways they connect us technologically and socially to others, are porous, penetrating, and penetrable."  Rather than a homogenising lens on platforms, Anable calls for increased scrutiny as to *who* is affected by platforms and whose lives they claim to improve. For instance, 'lean' labour platforms facilitate the domination of a precarious labour force, often intersecting with racial, class and gender fault lines. Regulation of these spaces cannot come a purely social or technical perspective. Rather than bracketing off the social this is to recognise the role that difference plays in the establishment of platform power.