Platforms and public participation (original) (raw)

The concept of the 'platform' has recently received extensive analysis in media studies and urban planning. This paper explores the platform's contemporary emergence as an expression of a new archival logic that questions the possibility of a democratic politics of participation. 'Public participation' in the platform invokes the individual in the form of a consumer with a profile rather than as a citizen of a state. This paper returns to Claudio Ciborra's 1996 work on the 'platform organization' to diagnose a 're-architecting' capability which we argue is integral to platform politics. Since this capacity for re-architecting is generally reserved from participants, we highlight the potential of 'de-participation' toward the emergence of counter-platforms. The 'platform' is one of the most prominent recent concepts to describe the operations of networked electronic media. As new media come to decompose the distinctions between previously discrete spheres of social and economic activity, the platform is an architectural metaphor that is widely deployed to describe contemporary infrastructure, recomposing domains of public and private, and the relation of the citizen to the collective. The most visible platforms are those in social media and personal computing: Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple have all been described as platforms. The material dimensions of gaming platforms have been given the most substantial analysis in new media theory and gaming studies (Bogost and Montfort 2007; Gillespie 2010: for critical accounts see Apperley and Parikka 2015; Leorke 2012). However, the platform concept has also been extended to describe the city (Hill 2012), and even government in general (O'Reilly 2010). Now applied to both the polis and the polity, the platform has become a powerful force in understanding the public sphere. Focusing on digital media, Gillespie (2010, 349) draws upon Keating and Cambrosio to group four different uses of the term 'platform' (from the old French 'flat form'): the architectural, the political, the figurative and more recently the computational. He notes that the contemporary use of the term 'platform' draws on all four semantic areas of his typology simultaneously, and condenses the crucial ideology of neutrality that connects these definitions and shows how this is discursively produced: All point to a common set of connotations: a 'raised level surface' designed to facilitate some activity that will subsequently take place. It is anticipatory, but not causal. It implies a neutrality with regards to the activity, though less so as the term gets specifically matched to specific functions (like a subway platform), and even less so in the political variation. A computing platform can be agnostic about what you might want to do with it, but either neutral (cross-platform) or very much not neutral (platform-dependent), according to which provider's application you would like to use. Drawing these meanings together, 'platform' emerges not simply as indicating a functional shape: it suggests a progressive and egalitarian arrangement, promising to support those who stand upon it. (ibid.