P LATFORM AS AN ORGANIZATIONAL FORM

The term platform (similar to that of the network) thrives both as a self-descriptive term in the sense that it is a term strategically deployed by media corporations (as pointed out by Tarleton Gillespie), and as a term and concept used to capture a particular organizational configuration that is technological, economical, managerial, discursive, and social in nature.

‘Platforms’, Steinberg writes, ‘are everywhere’: as social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram), as streaming platforms (Netflix, Spotify), and as e-commerce platforms (Amazon, Alibaba) just to mention a few (Steinberg 2019:1).

If the network was the key term of late 20^th and early 21^st century, then platform is the keyword of our time (ibid, 7). Sociological and social theoretical conceptions and diagnosis of society such as for example The Rise of The Network Society (Castells 2009), The Wealth of Networks (Benkler 2006), and Networked publics (Boyd 2011) are followed by notions of ‘the platform society’ (Dijck et al. 2018),

‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek 2016), ‘platformed sociality’ (Dijck 2013), and

‘platform economy’ (Steinberg 2019) pointing to an expansion of platforms into the

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strata of contemporary society and with it new forms of organizing. While the latter depictions not necessarily dismiss the network as a conceptual prism or method of analysis, nor assert that networked forms of organizing have vanished altogether, the rise of the term platform foregrounds and suggest a different organizational form than that of the network (Beyes 2020). The displacement of the term network with platform is, among scholars, being perceived and related to the transformation of the Internet into a commercialized infrastructure and enterprise. Steinberg writes, that while the ‘network, which offered a sense of openness, freedom, and rhizomatic extensivity (…) the platform concept is generally applied [by scholars] to the definitive closure of the network, the reigning in of a moment of perceived freedom that the open web was to offer’ (Steinberg 2019:22). We now turn to conceptions of platform as a particular technology of organizing.

Platforms as organizational devices of sociality

Media scholar José Van Dijck’s influential work on platforms theorizes social media platforms as social, technological, and economical constructs (Dijck 2013).

Platforms, Van Dijck writes, are ‘programmable digital architecture[s] (…) geared toward the systematic collection, algorithmic processing, circulation, and monetization of user data’ (Dijck et al. 2018:4). Social media platforms are technological constructs that encode social activities and interactions. The ‘like-button’, ‘friending’ and ‘following’ are examples of how social relations and interactions are programmed and integrated into the data structures of social media platforms (Dijck 2013:13). This encoding process is social and economic as the technological encoding and programming of social activities and relations also reflects intentions and strategic choices of platform owners (for example to stimulate more interaction or direct users towards certain content) (ibid, 29).

Specific to the platform is that social activities that hitherto produced limited material traits are now through a variety of functions integrated into these platforms

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that program them with a certain objective; a transformation where ‘networked communication’ and ‘participatory culture’ evolves into ‘platformed sociality’ and a ‘culture of connectivity’ (Dijck 2013:4–5). In this process of mediating and encoding human activities platforms render ‘(…) people’s activities formal, manageable, and manipulable, enabling platforms to engineer the sociality in people’s everyday routines.’ (ibid, 12). Van Dijck conceptually frames platforms as mediators rather that intermediaries – mediators between users and between users and organizations – that shape and construct the relations it enables rather than

‘merely facilitating them’ and does so according to platform specific logics (ibid, 29). Platforms are in that sense active participants in the construction of sociality, why the ‘social’ of social media must not be taken as existing prior to but rather as constructed through and as an effect of the particular organizational architecture of platforms (Couldry and Van Dijck 2015). Van Dijck attends to platforms, in the words of Stiegler, as technologies of grammatization, as she points to how the digital inscription of social relations through these platforms necessarily implies an organization of the relations that is mediated. Van Dijck identifies three overall mechanism that characterizes online platforms: datafication as the ability of platforms to quantify and render into data aspects of the world that was previously not quantifiable (Dijck et al. 2018:33); commodification as the ability of platforms to transform online and offline objects and activities into tradable commodities (ibid, 37); selection which is the ability of platforms and users themselves to filter, curate and ‘personalize’ content that in turn trigger and shape interactions online (ibid, 40). These three mechanisms are central in Van Dijck’s conceptions of platforms as organizational construct and in Chapter 6 we attend to the question of

‘personalization’.

The rise and expansion of social media platforms beyond specific websites has led to the notion of platformization. Media scholar Anne Helmond explicit links ‘platformization’ to the transformation and expansion of media

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technologies such as Facebook that goes from being social network sites that one enter to become larger infrastructures as they are offering their APIs (application programming interface) for the development of websites and applications (Helmond 2015:5). Platformization is understood as a technical transformation of the web that has emerged with the expansion and success of media technologies such as Facebook that expand logics of datafication and commodification of online social interactions into how websites are developed and constructed (ibid). The like button being an example of this extension of platforms into the fabric of web (Gerlitz and Helmond 2013). Thus, if a defining aspect of social media platforms consist in a transformation of what ‘used to be informal and ephemeral manifestation of social life (…) into formalized inscriptions’ embedding them in ‘the larger economy of wider publics’ (Dijck 2013:6–7), then by way of tertiarizing and bringing into circulation the ‘ephemeral manifestation of social life’ the latter also becomes a generalized object for others to consume. While these tertiarizing functions and the integration of individual experiences into a variety of platforms and webpages are not confined to social media platforms (for example most newspapers have commenting function) these nevertheless occupies a privileged position as the generalized object of consumption and circulation are individual and social experiences. Helmond’s argument of a platformatisation of the web further underlines as platform are primary vehicles in the extension of these tertiarizing functions into the web – the like button form example being a standardized form of tertiarizing. Social media platforms as an infrastructural technology that expands into the web and produces the condition for proliferation of human experiences as technological memory while at the same time being systems that manage this proliferation.

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The platform as a new logic of capitalist accumulation

With the diagnostic term ‘surveillance capitalism’ Shoshana Zuboff describes a contemporary techno-economic complex of media platforms, capitalist mode of production, and process of organizing. Facebook and Google are technologies that collect data about human experience in order to modify and intervene in human life with, as she writes, a ‘radical indifference’ towards anything but economic profit (Zuboff 2019:377). Zuboff’s attention to the extraction and rendering of human experience into data can be read as a critique of the organizational logic of scripting and rendering human experience profitable by means of collecting and monitoring increasingly more aspects of human life, a logic that permeates contemporary platforms such as Google and Facebook (Beyes 2020). Similar is Nick Srnicek’s theorization of platforms as an emerging firm and business model attentive to platforms as creating infrastructures of relations (for example between users and users and organization) while at the same time monitoring and rendering these relations into data (Srnicek 2016:44). Srnicek distinguish between five different types of platforms where social media platforms fall under the category of

‘advertising platforms’ (ibid, 49). Both Zuboff and Srnicek captures how a contemporary constellation of a capitalist logic of accumulation and digital technologies have evolved into an organizational complex that renders human experiences and relations profitable. How this new organizational complex reconfigures the sphere of consumption and relations to objects – remains in large outside the scope of their attention. In Platform Capitalism, social media platforms fall under the advertising platform and are therefore foremost analysed as a specific business model. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism the question of consumption tends to be confined to how the use and functions of media technologies involves and forces the consumer to accept certain terms of use that allows for and is the condition for the extraction, collection, and commodification of human experiences in the first place. Thus, consumption is primarily understood as the process by the

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use of media technologies enables the process of extracting, capturing, and commodifying ‘human experiences’ with the intended purpose of selling advertisement or controlling future behaviour. How the relation to and experience of objects (that is: consumption) is being transformed through this digitalization of objects and human interactions – which Zuboff and Srnicek ascribe an essential role in contemporary capitalism – remains in large outside the scope of respectively Platform Capitalism and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. This does not undermine the perspective they bring to the contemporary intertwinement of media platforms and capitalism but it nevertheless points towards how this organizational complex of media platforms and capitalist logic of rendering human experience productive is also a process of rendering human experience consumptive.

Platforms as organizational technologies of prosumption

In critical media studies the notion of ‘prosumption’ and ‘attention economy’ have been applied to understand the process by which social media platforms valorize and profit from user activities (Charitsis 2016; Fuchs 2012, 2014; Ritzer 2014;

Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010; Zulli 2018). A pertinent question is how distinctions between work and free-time and between activities of production and that of consumption are being blurred by social media platforms (Beverungen et al. 2015;

Charitsis 2016; Fuchs 2014). It is for example argued that with social media platforms ‘prosumption’ (i.e. the inability to separate processes of production from processes of consumption and vice versa) is at the very core of contemporary economic value creation (Charitsis 2016; Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010). This is why social media platforms are emblematic of the contemporary economic value creation. A key debate is how consumers’ use of platforms are rendered productive;

productive in the economic sense of term and productive in the sense that user’s themselves produce the content as that which is the object of consumption (i.e. user-generated content). In this context platforms are foremost taken as organizational

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technologies of prosumption where focus is on how the use and services of social media platforms involves processes of commodification and valorization (of attention, of social interactions, of free time etc.) and how the use (i.e. consumption) foremost is integrated into structures of production (of value, content, of the services, of the medium itself). Consumption is perceived and theorized primarily as an active moment in the production of economic value. Following the reading of Baudrillard’s notion of consumption as a broader system of experiences and practices through which human experience and anticipation are configured I suggest broadening the attention beyond that of processes of commodification and valorization that occurs in the ‘use’ of social media platforms to also notice how social media content (i.e. tertiary retention) is technologically organized and the human experiences and relations that emerges from this. Thus while work on social media consumption and production has been explored as the production and consumption of data, of time and/or of attention (see for example Charitsis, 2016;

Fuchs, 2014; Herman, 2013; Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010) revealing how the consumer is integrated into the production of content, of value and so forth, the reconceptualization of consumption through a reading of Baudrillard’s notion of consumption and Stiegler’s theory of technics can develop and further qualify our conception of social media platforms as technologies of consumption. In Part III, Chapter 9, we will return to this question of prosumption in light of the analysis of Instagram in Part II.

Platforms as managerial devices

In Platform Economy (2019) Mark Steinberg encourages us to think foremost of platforms as ‘apparatuses for the management of relations — economic but also social—allowing platforms to insert themselves into any and all relationships’

(Steinberg 2019:120). Steinberg, connects the rise of platforms to the emergence of a new marketing strategy and thus involving a re-configuration of how cultural

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commodities are produced. In that context, Steinberg suggests, three historical phases of consumption. A phase based on marketing consumer goods based on needs and objective functions, which is replaced by a strategy that infuses and produces the object as sign. Sign based marketing was then replaced by narrative marketing in which it is not a specific object that is branded but the universe in which the object exists. With platforms, narrative marketing is developed into what Steinberg defines as ‘contents’ marketing (Steinberg 2019:54–62).

If the model for media production is no longer a discrete commodity (a book) but rather a trans-media commodity array (book-anime-game-toy, and so forth), a word is needed to describe this medium-agnostic sequence.

Contents seems to be the ideal candidate (…). (Steinberg 2019:65).

Contents, then, is a ‘schema’ rather than a mere substance. It is a form of packaging, a filter that endows entertainment goods with economic value.

(…) ultimately my claim is that contents functions as a form of discursive and economic packaging that endows cultural entertainment goods with economic value, preparing them for platform intermediation (…).

(Steinberg 2019:62/64).

With ‘contents’ marketing Steinberg describe the process by which consumption of cultural goods transverse different media. Taking Steinberg’s point, a bit further we can say that he, similar to Baudrillard, understands consumption not as the consumption of singular content, but that consumption involves an ordering and sequencing of multiple content into ‘contents’. Platform consumption involves a reconfiguration of relations to objects in a way in which it is not a relation to a single object but involves multiple objects as they are organized and sequenced across different media platforms. While Steinberg in this context does not speak specifically about social media consumption, the conception of platforms as managerial constructs that ‘shape us and the relations we enter into with other

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people, companies, and objects’ (Steinberg 2019:3) is sensitive to the platform as organizational form that reorganizes process of consumption, as attention is directed towards how platforms as managerial devices induces different relations to objects and how this implies a sequencing and organization of objects. I shall return to Steinberg’s notion of ‘contents’ in the analysis of the stream-like organization of content in Chapter 5.