 Are there people in platform studies (broadly construed, not just the media studies subdiscipline) who are actively thinking through decentralized social media and its relation to "platform"? It's increasingly clear to me that the social and material relations of the fediverse do not map onto "platform" as the field has come to understand it. DISCLAIMER: if you are not an academic please don't reply with your opinion, I'm asking academics for a reason. 19 comments | Expand all CWs
@darius hi Darius. My work has broadly* been dealing with these issues for a number of years, but I tend to think about it in relationship to protocol as opposed to platform. @Ericbarrydrasin that's a great distinction. Is there anything you've published on thinking about protocol, or related work you'd recommend? @darius tbh most of my prior work was thinking about protocols for art(pre-nft), right now I am working through Galloway and thinking about how protocol is in a feedback loop with ideology and attendant sociality/ political subjectivity. Maybe I’ll have something coherent to share in a few months, but happy to talk in the interim. @Ericbarrydrasin Ohhhh right I really need to read Galloway's "Protocol", thank for the reminder! And yes always happy to talk @darius This paper on SSB is quite technical, some of the stuff on identity might be of interest https://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2019/proceedings/icn19-19.pdf I'm doing a thesis at the moment on the discordant consequences of having our digital social spaces be informed by corporate interests And as far as I'm aware, the field is only just tentatively beginning to explore decentralized networks as something distinct from other more-traditional platforms @darius I'm working on a long essay/short book that argues that federated social media is an example of emergent federating practices that we can track to online and offline spaces (labor organizing but also other examples of solidarity organizations). Not published yet but happy to share. @jamesjbrownjr Yeah, Galloway has been on my reading list for a long time now. Seems like I have a winter holiday activity lined up! @darius I think the most developed analytical work has been done in Poell et al’s Platforms and Cultural Production. Because so much of the definition is about commodification and markets I think decentralized networks don’t, right now, fit into it.
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@darius attn @danjokaz00ie, @loriemerson, @dwershler