#platformStudies

2025-03-30

After 16 years and 7 months I’ve finished Platform and Agency

I’ll do one more read through when it gets back from my proof reader, but the book I started in September 2008 with my PhD is now finished 👇

The virtue of the detraditionalisation thesis lay in its insistence on a meta-process, a change which exceeds empirical trends which can be measured. It provides, as Lundby (2009: 141) puts it, “a meta approach that makes it possible to integrate very different results of surveys and qualitative investigations into an overall coherent understanding”. The problems with the detraditionalisation thesis arose from the grandiose poetics which left it captivated by its own pronouncements about epochal change. For this reason I believe we ought to be as cautious as we can be about declaring an outcome to sociotechnical change, without dispensing with the recognition that there will be an outcome. If anything the vast investment in LLMs and the data infrastructure which supports them, intersecting with a post-pandemic political economy which appears to be leaving neoliberalism behind, heralds an intensification of change rather than a diminution (Tooze 2021, Varoufakis 2023). It’s possible this might be leading towards a perpetual polycrisis, a social order unable to stabilise itself amidst an accelerating climate catastrophe. But even this doom loop, suggested by Seymour’s (2024) notion of disaster nationalism, represents a social order of sorts, even if it’s an apocalyptic one. 

It is difficult to incorporate this horizon of crisis into our frame of reference without subordinating our analysis of the interaction phase through which it is being generated. However by  approaching platformisation through the concepts of psychobiography and personal morphogenesis, I have argued that we can avoid both grandiose (and premature) pronouncements about a ‘digital age’ and dismissive rejections of the reality of genuine change. The analysis I’ve offered of distracted people and fragile movements explores how platforms reconfigure rather than replace human agency. By examining how reflexivity operates within platformised contexts, tracing its biographical unfolding rather than proclaiming wholesale transformation, we gain a more textured understanding of contemporary social life. This has meant breaking with an account of agency premised, as Savage (2021: 191) puts it,  “on this ontological temporal difference between past, enduring structures, and a contemporary contingent agency that breaks from them”. Unless we can surrender this baggage, we are left with a meta-process defined through the falling away of the past, operationalising ‘tradition’ as that which is experiencing a decline and thus squeezing out continuities through definitional fiat. The problem is not an epochal horizon, as much as ontological assumptions which lead to the epistemic mistakes of pronouncing epochal change in a grandiose and premature manner. A realist conception of the platform can acknowledge its emerging status as a condition of our social existence, while remaining clear that is we who must decide what to make of it.

#biography #criticalRealism #epochalTheorising #personalMorphogenesis #PlatformAndAgency #platformStudies #socialChange #socialRealism

2025-01-03

Using reasoning models to support theory-building

If you’ve not tried this, I highly recommend it. I’ve barely scratched the surface but this was GPT o1’s response to the question: “Should the category of ‘platform’ be a central category of sociological analysis, analogous to ‘structure’ and ‘agency’?”

Whether “platform” should join “structure” and “agency” as a central, standalone category of sociological analysis is a matter of ongoing debate. On one hand, it’s clear that digital platforms—like Facebook, Twitter/X, YouTube, TikTok, Uber, Airbnb, Amazon—are not merely new media formats or corporate business models. They also shape social action in distinctive ways, influencing how we work, communicate, organize politically, and even form identities. On the other hand, there is a question as to whether “platform” points to something so fundamentally novel that it requires its own theoretical category, or whether it is best seen as a specific kind of social structure (or socio-technical assemblage) that still fits under the older rubrics of “structure” and “agency.”

Below are some considerations that help clarify why sociologists are increasingly turning to “platform” as a key concept—and whether it rises to the level of “structure” or “agency.”

1. Platforms as Socio-Technical Infrastructures

Argument for treating “platform” as a central concept:
Platforms operate as socio-technical infrastructures, facilitating (and constraining) social life in a way that is both material and symbolic. Like highways, railroads, or electrical grids, they have become embedded in everyday life, shaping and enabling certain forms of interaction. But unlike most traditional infrastructures, platforms often incorporate algorithmic decision-making, extract user data, and self-update at scale. This makes them active participants in social ordering rather than merely passive channels for human action.

If we look at “structure” in classical sociological terms (e.g., Durkheim, Parsons, Giddens), it often refers to stable patterns of social relations, institutions, norms, and resources. Yet platforms are dynamic systems: they morph through updates, policies, and algorithmic tweaking. Their affordances can rapidly shift, creating novel patterns of inclusion and exclusion. Hence, some scholars argue that “platform” highlights these new dynamics more precisely than the broad term “structure” does.

2. Platforms as Gateways to Agency

Argument for integration under existing categories (structure/agency):
From another perspective, the key insight of the structure–agency debate is precisely that social life involves ongoing interplay between broad social forces (structure) and individual or collective capacities to act (agency). Platforms, in this sense, can be interpreted as a new kind of social structure—one that is digitally mediated but still shapes and is shaped by human agency. Users can creatively engage with platforms, but their choices are funneled through interface designs, algorithmic rules, business models, and terms of service.

  • Structure: The platform’s architecture, algorithms, data policies, and ownership models.
  • Agency: The creative actions of individuals and groups using, resisting, or repurposing platform functions.

This reading suggests that platforms do not require a separate conceptual status but rather exemplify how digital infrastructures function as a powerful structural force, simultaneously enabling and constraining user agency.

3. Platforms and Power

Why “platform” might matter in its own right:
Digital platforms raise distinct questions about power and governance. They sit at the intersection of markets, states, and everyday life. For instance, data extraction, targeted advertising, and algorithmic curation introduce new forms of social control—often privatized, proprietary, and opaque. The notion of “platform governance” or “platform capitalism” points to logics that are different from classic state regulation or older capitalist enterprises.

  • Datafication and Surveillance: Platforms collect and monetize user data, shaping surveillance practices in ways that produce new structural asymmetries (platform owners vs. users).
  • Algorithmic Governance: Automated systems decide visibility, relevance, or even credibility of information. This shapes cultural production and public discourse.
  • Monopolistic Power: Many platforms function as near-monopolies or oligopolies, reshaping labor (e.g., gig economy), media (e.g., news distribution), and personal relationships (social networking).

From this vantage, “platform” captures a constellation of power relations, economic models, and technical logics that may not be neatly encompassed by the more generic category of “structure.”

4. Platforms as Relational, Not Merely Technological

Scholars in platform studies emphasize that platforms are relational—they connect different user groups, advertisers, developers, governments, and so on, often under terms set unilaterally by the platform owner. These shifting relational ties create a meta-structure that is neither purely technological nor purely social. Some consider it akin to an institutional form or “platform institutionalism,” with rules and norms that differ substantially from, say, a family unit, a workplace, or a nation-state.

If we maintain a classic sociological approach, we can see this as a novel set of “structural” relations: hierarchy (platform owners) vs. participants (end-users, third-party developers, advertisers), each with differing degrees of power and knowledge. Yet the concept of “platform” helps us foreground how these new forms of relationality and governance are emergent and deeply intertwined with digital technology.

5. Should “Platform” Be Elevated to a Core Category?

The Case For

  1. Novelty of Platform Power: The specific economic, algorithmic, and infrastructural logics of platforms (e.g., data extraction, network effects, lock-in, proprietary algorithms) represent a qualitative transformation of social organization and power.
  2. Core of the Digital Age: As social life, politics, and culture become “platformized,” the phenomenon is central enough to demand explicit theorization distinct from standard social structures.
  3. Hybrid Social–Technical Assemblages: Platforms complicate the long-standing sociological binaries of macro/micro or structure/agency, because they operate at multiple levels simultaneously: from user interface design (micro) to global data flows (macro).

The Case Against

  1. Platforms as a Sub-Case of Structure: Ultimately, platforms are structures—albeit new, technologically driven ones. They belong within existing frameworks of sociological analysis (structure vs. agency, macro vs. micro, etc.).
  2. Risk of Overemphasis: Declaring “platform” a brand-new category might fragment sociological theory or overshadow the fact that many “platform effects” replicate old inequalities or power struggles.
  3. Existing Theoretical Tools: Concepts like field, network, institution, and discourse (Bourdieu, Latour, Goffman, Foucault) can be extended to analyze how platforms shape power, knowledge, and social interaction without the need for a separate fundamental category.

6. Conclusion: An Evolving Consensus

While it remains open whether “platform” will endure as a sociological category on par with “structure” or “agency,” there is little doubt that it has become central to empirical studies of digital society. Much like “institution” or “field” in earlier sociological writing, “platform” captures a specific way that social relations are organized and governed.

  • Analytically, it can be productive to treat “platform” as a key concept—one that highlights the socio-technical and economic specificities of digital media environments.
  • Theoretically, whether it becomes a foundational category alongside “structure” and “agency” depends on how well it can integrate with, or transform, our broader frameworks of sociological thought.

In practice, many sociologists today do treat “platform” as a near-axiomatic concept, precisely because so much of contemporary social life—including labor, culture, politics, and personal relationships—runs through platform infrastructures. At the same time, some argue that we should tread cautiously, applying “platform” as a lens to analyze new social forms without prematurely elevating it to the status of an all-encompassing category.

In short, there is no settled answer—but there is a clear imperative to study platforms and to refine our theoretical tools in light of the profound reorganization of social life that platforms are bringing about. Whether that means adding “platform” to the triumvirate of “structure” and “agency” is an ongoing, generative debate in contemporary sociology.

#GPTO1 #platformStudies #reasoningModels

The Video Game Library 📚 thevideogamelibrary.org@bsky.brid.gy
2024-12-13
The English book cover of Enacting Platforms. 

An analysis of the game engine Unreal through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, as well as a critique of the platform studies framework itself.


In this first scholarly book on the Unreal game engine, James Malazita explores one of the major contemporary game development platforms through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, revealing how Unreal produces, and is produced by, broader intersections of power. Enacting Platforms takes a novel critical platform studies approach, raising deeper questions: what are the material and cultural limits of platforms themselves? What is the relationship between the analyst and the platform of study, and how does that relationship in part determine what “counts” as the platform itself? Malazita also offers a forward-looking critique of the platform studies framework itself.


The Unreal platform serves as a kind of technical and political archive of the games industry, highlighting how the techniques and concerns of games have shifted and accreted over the past 30 years. Today, Unreal is also used in contexts far beyond games, including in public communication, biomedical research, civil engineering, and military simulation and training. The author’s depth of technical analysis, combined with new archival findings, contributes to discussions of topics rarely covered in games studies (such as the politics of graphical rendering algorithms), as w
Miguel Afonso Caetanoremixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2024-08-07

#Algorithms #AlgorithmicMedia #PlatformStudies: "Overall, this book has all the potential to become a classic in the literature on the composite relationships between users and digital technologies. While it is going to be of great appeal for all the scholars within the fields of critical algorithm and platform studies, readers from diverse backgrounds interested in issues related to the use of technology can find the book easily accessible given the clarity of the theoretical framework and development, the poignancy of the discussed empirical cases and the overall lucidity of the argument construction."

tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10

2024-07-05

The platform studies book by José P. Zagal and @benjedwards dedicated to the Virtual Boy is out and… available in open access!!! ❤️

direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monogr

#VirtualBoy #PlatformStudies #GameStudies

The book cover
2024-05-03

Hi everyone 👋🏻 --- I’m co-organising a hybrid talk series on Sound & AI in the Cultural Industries over the coming months at UvA. All are welcome to join us online.

More info and rsvp link here: rmes.nl/lecture-series-sound-a

#AIVoice #PlatformStudies #PodcastStudies #DataStudies

2024-01-29

@lbngr If #platformstudies is a thing now, where could I read more?

I'm mostly interested in accounts of platform commoning, but would like to see how other heterodox economies perform. What is a #Degrowth platform, or how do platforms benefit coops and SSEs?

Somehow it also feels connected to the #GigEconomy work by Mark Graham. Sadly moving off Twitter split all those ties from my PoV.

2023-12-08

New article on GitHub and the platformisation of software development by @lbngr in Convergence: publicdatalab.org/2023/12/08/g

The article is accompanied by a set of free tools codeveloped with @dmi for researching Github.

#platformstudies #platformisation #newmedia #mediastudies #softwarestudies #digitalmethods #commodon #socialmedia #github #opensource

Liliana Bounegrulbngr@assemblag.es
2023-11-29

2/2 The software tools used to collect GitHub data for this study were created at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and are freely accessible to researchers and students interested in studying GitHub: wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/To #CulturalStudies #mediastudies #internetstudies #platformstudies

Liliana Bounegrulbngr@assemblag.es
2023-11-29

1/2 My article on GitHub and the platformization of software development just got published: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.11. I’m grateful to colleagues who helped with this inc. Erik Borra, Emile den Tex, Sam Leon, @MJBroersma @markdeuze, Carolin Gerlitz, @jwyg Jean-Christophe Plantin, Karin Raeymaeckers, Richard Rogers, Tommaso Venturini and Esther Weltevrede. #CulturalStudies #mediastudies #internetstudies #platformstudies

2023-11-20

Demain, le cours Algorithmes et structures de données est consacré à la compression de données. Mon collègue donne la première heure sur le fonctionnement de l'algorithme derrière le format JPEG, tandis que je ferai un exposé sur l'encodage des niveaux de Super Mario Bros. Ainsi, c'est avec énormément de bonheur que je relis le chapitre 4 du I AM ERROR (2015) de Nathan Altice. Quel ouvrage. #GameStudies #PlatformStudies #UNIL #LettresUNIL

Confoederatio Ludenschludens@hcommons.social
2023-10-18

On Monday, @pyhurel and @yrochat were guest lecturers in the course of their #CHLudens colleagues at Bern University.

They presented their research (and @SoBemel's) on the "Computer" fair which happened in Lausanne from 1978 to 2004 and on the Swiss computer Smaky and its games. #GameStudies #PlatformStudies #MediaArchaeology @gamelabunilepfl

2023-10-11

Depuis cette rentrée, nous publions des travaux de nos étudiants et étudiantes sur un carnet de recherche Hypothèses.

Le premier est consacré à la #Microvision, cette console portable de la fin des années 1970 qui a connu une douzaine de jeux.

«Microvision: de combien micro est-il le nombre ?», par Théo Rochat

jeulausanne.hypotheses.org/84

#GameStudies #SciencesDuJeu #PlatformStudies #UNIL #LettresUNIL #VideoGames #Retrogaming

Sur une table, une Microvision accompagnée d'une dizaine de jeux en boîte.
2023-10-09

Out today: "Google Radio Automation and the broadcast plights behind platformization" doi.org/10.1177/14614448231203 🔓

in which I narrate the weird story of Google's late-aughts entry into the radio industry and argue that the recession, on top of "traditional" media consolidation, played a decisive role in spurring the rhetorical and infrastructural separation of the streaming/platform model as a "new" medium

#commodon #mediastudies #radiostudies #platformstudies

2023-10-03

@GamingNews The true origins of #PlatformStudies

Benjamin WOO Chun Howgeek_worlds@scholar.social
2023-05-06

Our new article on the conceptual and material relationships between platforms fan conventions like San Diego Comic-Con, before and during the pandemic, is now online and open access at New Media & Society. doi.org/10.1177/14614448231165

#Commodon #MediaStudies #FanStudies #ComicsStudies #PlatformStudies #ComicCon

Benjamin WOO Chun Howgeek_worlds@scholar.social
2023-03-07

My article with Melanie Kohnen and Felan Parker on the platformization of San Diego Comic-Con has been officially accepted by New Media & Society. We got some great feedback before and during the peer review process and are excited to finally share this work more widely.

#FanStudies #PlatformStudies

KCL Digital Humanitieskingsdh@hcommons.social
2023-02-23

Can people engage in debates about digitisation using indigenous languages? How does linguistic colonialism manifest itself in digital technologies? What are the implications of digital platform use for the future of African languages?

Looking forward to this online event on "African languages and technological transformations: debating knowledge, rights and power on a digital continent":
kingsdh.net/2023/02/23/africa-

#digitalhumanities #digitalculture #digitalrights #platformstudies #colonialism #linguisticcolonialism #decolonisation #language #africanlanguages #commodon #mediastudies #internetstudies #africaweek

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