The Politics of “Platforms”

Abstract

This essay examines how online content providers such as YouTube are positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers, and policymakers. One term in particular, "platform," helps reveal the contours of this discursive work. "Platform" has been deployed by these content providers in both their populist appeals to users and their marketing pitches to advertisers and media providers, not just as technical platforms but as platforms of opportunity. Whatever tensions exist in serving all of these constituencies are elided. The term also fits their efforts to shape information policy, where they seek legislative protection on the basis of facilitating user expression, yet also claim limited liability for what those users say. As these providers increasingly become the curators of public discourse, we must examine the roles they aim to play, and the criteria they set by which they hope to be judged.

Young people, digital media making and critical digital citizenship

“…This fear is reinforced by those promulgating the argument that privately-owned corporations (e.g. Google, Facebook and Twitter) now routinely take ownership of users' content and for free (Andrejevic, 2014;Fuchs, 2014;Gillespie, 2010;Halpin, 2013;Miller, 2009).…”

“…Using the example of YouTube, Gillespie argues that it has successfully created a discourse around its 'egalitarian facilitation of expression, not an elitist gatekeeper with normative and technical restrictions ' (p. 352). Yet, in an age of 'platform politics' (Gillespie, 2010;Hands, 2013), the rhetoric of the democratic, open and egalitarian Web has been subject to significant critique (Fuchs, 2014). As Ritzer and Jurgenson (2010) suggest, many people are unaware of the presence of corporate entities as owners of their favourite social platforms, accepting their terms and conditions unquestioningly and ignoring the concession of their personal data for free.…”

“…At a time when spreadable media (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013) makes predefined boundaries between the inside and outside of school, between public and private, and leisure and work increasingly difficult to sustain, it is important to explore how young people experience and make sense of these environments. In possession of powerful mobile technologies and with easy access to a plethora of platforms (Gillespie, 2010; van Dijck, 2013) with both educational and entertainment functions, young people can now learn and play interchangeably in a fashion impossible only a few years previously. The emergence of the social Web (including Web 2.0 services) has further eroded distinctions between media production and consumption creating space for the emergence of the prosumer (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010) who both creates and consumes online content.…”

“…In this reading, citizenship is then only possible on the basis of a particular kind of conduct, with empowered citizens taking responsibility for their own life outcomes, self-governing behaviour which requires them to invest time and energy in enterprising their own lives. This critique is relevant to the apparently free and democratic space of Web 2.0, where users are encouraged to generate content and given the 'opportunity' to have it hosted on an open, neutral and egalitarian 'platform' (Gillespie, 2010) which gives the user the power to speak on an equal footing. Using the example of YouTube, Gillespie argues that it has successfully created a discourse around its 'egalitarian facilitation of expression, not an elitist gatekeeper with normative and technical restrictions ' (p. 352).…”

Social media and the public interest: Governance of news platforms in the realm of individual and algorithmic gatekeepers

“…As Gillespie (2010) notes, "like the television networks and trade publishers before them," new media platforms such as social media are "increasingly facing questions about their responsibilities: to their users, to key constituencies who depend on the public discourse they host, and to broader notions of the public interest" (p. 348, emphasis added).…”