The platformization of gender and sexual identities: an algorithmic analysis of Pornhub

The platformization of consumer culture: A theoretical framework

“…With platformization, Poell et al (2022) contend, platforms become new kinds of cultural institutions that create markets and act as intermediaries and providers of legitimacy for actors involved in the context in which they operate. Within this theoretical framework, scholars provide many concrete examples of this phenomenon (Poell et al, 2022; Rama et al, 2023). For instance, O’Meara (2019) and Bishop (2019), respectively, on Instagram and YouTube, explore the practices through which communities of influencers manage to manipulate platforms’ algorithms in order to make their posts more visible.…”

“…Bonini and Gandini (2019), through their ethnography of Spotify, observe that algorithmic and human curators are supplanting traditional cultural intermediaries to become new music gatekeepers. Rama et al (2023) show how, through algorithmic recommendations, the process of platformization of adult and sexual content is directly ingrained in the cultural construction of gender and sexual identities. These examples concur to confirm what argued by Nieborg and Poell and, relatedly, Poell et al (2022), who maintain that platforms make cultural commodities become “fundamentally contingent,” that is a constant flow of modular contents which are “continuously reworked and repackaged, informed by datafied user feedback” (2018: 4275).…”