Digital platforms as entangled infrastructures: Addressing public values and trust in messaging apps

Abstract

Digital platforms have increasingly become accepted and trusted by European citizens as indispensable utilities for social interaction and communication in everyday life. This article aims to analyze how trust in and dependence of these ubiquitous platforms for mediated communication is configured and the kind of consequences this has for user (dis)empowerment and public values. Our analysis builds on insights from the domestication perspective and infrastructure studies. In order to illustrate our conceptual approach, we use the case of messaging apps. We demonstrate how these apps as an essential social infrastructure are entangled with a corporate-computational infrastructure. The entangling of both types of infrastructures leads to a paradox where users feel compelled to appropriate these socially indispensable apps in everyday life, while also making them dependent on their corporate control mechanisms. In order to get out of the paradox and empower users these infrastructures and their data sharing need to be disentangled. For this, we apply the notion of ‘infrastructural inversion’ as a way to surface opaque and hidden properties of the digital platforms. We conclude with a discussion of potential other routes for infrastructural inversion in order to establish data disentanglement that serves public interest values.

Data Co-Operatives through Data Sovereignty

“…The second feature refers to the fact that citizens should be empowered to intervene and shape interventions in collaboration with the government or establish their own initiatives by using shareable data. The third feature addresses digital rights as the core that should lead to digital inclusion at all levels in smart cities [95,96].…”

Taxonomy of Social Network Platform Affordances for Group Interactions

“…Given the increased platformisation [12] of Social Network Sites, we have decided to use the broader term "social network platforms", hereinafter referred to as 'platforms'. By 'platformisation', we understand that the earlier social network sites have become their own micro-cosmoses on the internet, taking various shapes as digital platforms and mobile messaging apps [13]. The notion of affordances provides the suitable conceptual lens for this study on user interactions and group dynamics on social network platforms.…”

The platform as ecosystem

“…Despite this ambiguity, it is arguably no coincidence that the most powerful of the Big Tech companies, and the most popular 'platforms' they own, all offer online social networking services in one way or another, or even started out as such. Facebook, Google (with Gmail, for instance), Twitter, and others became vital to people's everyday life and practice as free-of-charge and trusted services for online communication and sociality (e.g., Pierson, 2021), after which they could more effectively leverage their established positions to generate revenue from people's online ('datafied') social actions and behaviours, most notably through online digital marketing and advertising (Crain, 2021;Turow, 2013;Zuboff, 2019). Social networks are the very core of the 'ecosystem of connective media'.…”

“…Indeed, these types of software-based systems and structures are woven into the very fabric of everyday social and economic life and practice around the globe: for many people, Facebook's 'Family of Apps and Services' is the portal to the Internet; Google's search engine and advertising technology ('adtech') is a hidden structure that influences people's social actions and behaviours, and Amazon and Microsoft's cloud services are the 'back-end' infrastructure for many of the apps and services that consumers and businesses use or need to operate (Gault, 2021). 29 28 https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/ 29 Scholars note that Big Tech companies themselves commonly make statements of building 'social infrastructure' and of being indispensable in social life (e.g., Edwards, 2003: 187;Hoffmann et al, 2018;Pierson, 2021;Rider and Murakami Wood, 2019). For instance, Facebook's mission statement changed in 2017 from 'connecting people' to developing 'the social infrastructure for community-for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all' (Zuckerberg, 2017;cf.…”

“…Network effects explain the rapid proliferation of the 'platform' as a 'dominant infrastructural and economic model' (Helmond, 2015a: 1;Helmond, 2015b) in many different economic sectors and 'spheres of life' (Poell et al, 2019). Social media 'platforms' have leveraged network effects to the extent that they are now increasingly discussed in terms of 'public utilities', 'essential services', or critical 'infrastructures' (e.g., Alaimo and Kallinikos, 2017;Barns, 2019;Pierson, 2021;Plantin and Punathambekar, 2019;Plantin et al, 2018;van Dijck, 2021b). A small handful of core Big Tech companies increasingly perform the role of infrastructure providers to the rest of society in an 'internet-societal complex' (Flyverbom et al, 2019).…”