Five Theses: 3) STILL MAKE SOCIAL THEORIES
You will be many more, and you will tip into a crowd.[14] But what will draw you together might be the weakest of attractions—emotional spectacles that dazzle then dissipate beneath the threshold of the scrollbar. For platforms to do more than conjure clickbaited coteries of opinion requires caring about and for the means and mechanics of intra-action, the affective forces through which publics can arise.[15]
A public, as Noortje Marres puts it, “comes about when actors are implicated in a particular distribution of problematic effects”[16], and this implication cannot be managed through existing institutional arrangements or administrative procedures. Publics coalesce around particular ‘issues’, brought together by the interests they hold in common— “all those,” according to Dewey, “who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions, to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for.”[17] Those ‘matters of concern’ are articulated through local values and intimate investments that can be alternatively, and all at once, economic, normative, and vital.
Since the turn of the 21st century, platforms have increasingly become the primary instrument for the articulation of such ‘matters of concern’—an arena for political contestation and provocation. Social networks like Facebook and (formerly) Twitter promised dialogic space for issue-formation, the kind of problems that exceed institutional capacity, and generate demand for democratic debate and animate action.[18]
But the political capacities of the digital forum cannot be reduced to the enlargement of democratic discourse. The ease and facility of communication on the internet made it possible for any manner of interest group to form and exchange opinions on the state of the world. Publics are the product of social imagination—a sense of its community that transcends the space of discourse, which on the seemingly infinite communicative expanse of the internet, Chris Kelty (2005) argued, was necessarily recursive. ‘Recursive publics’ are imagined not through some shared identity, but rather from the technical and legal work through which collective commitments can be articulated. In other words, where assembly is easy, what comes to matter is the infrastructures of communication and the degree to which speech can be rendered authentic, independent, and meaningful. “Openness” Kelty writes, “is a practice and a concept on which recursiveness depends: If one cannot access and see the software and protocols, if they are not open, this particular public cannot exist.”[19]
Twenty years on, the openness Chris Kelty sees nurtured by movements such as Free Software, is becoming harder to come by. Changes in the algorithmic orders on platforms to prioritize monetizable ‘interests’–the hegemonic extensions of capital that foreclose the kinds of direct engagement and technical adjustments capable of yielding more consequential forms of social imagination.
The platforms themselves have the mass and scale that politicians and political discourse lack. This is precisely why we need to study the gravitational logics of platforms as bodies that attract and repel. Looking at platforms with gravitas, with dignity and care, means being willing to make the solid claims that can exert their own force of agreement, disagreement, or apathy, to resist the postmodern impulse to hedge, temporize, and otherwise dance around “the thing.” Accounting for the gravitas shortage in public life requires an account of the platform’s affective attractions and its potential to generate the kind of black holes from which no form of light or life can escape.
In the 2000’s, researchers who wanted to see platform culture in action could join open source programming production teams like the Debian LINUX open group meetings.[20] Platform production has become much more sequestered and private, therefore, we need to compensate for this by being theoretically more adventuresome, pushy, and big. We need to bring social theory to platforms even if we can’t get access to source code, to think through people and culture and discourse.
A social theory of the platform derived for these five theses must ground itself in materiality/bodies, not solely tempting abstractions. Firstly we no longer have access to the abstractions (code) that matter. Though we need access to the black box of code, and as researchers we ought to have it, in the meantime, we can think through our bodies and their specific gravities in and with platforms.
[14] Granovetter (1978), Threshold Models of Human Behavior, theorizes models of collective action and behavior and the thresholds through which individuals aggregate and create situations irreducible to individual preferences.
[15] Karen Barad suggests intra-action to foreground the ontological relationality of agency—in contrast to ‘interaction’ which posits discrete and pre-existing phenomena which then relate to each other, intra-action emerges as a dynamism of forces through which ‘things’ are in constant a state of perennially entangled process of exchange and diffraction (Barad, 2007, p. 141) in Barad, K.M. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke U Press.
[16] Marres, N. (2012). The Invention of Material Publics: Returns to American Pragmatism. Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics, (p. 43).
[17] Dewey, J. (1927), The Public and Its Problems, 15–16. See also Barry, A. (2021). What is an Environmental Problem? Theory, Culture & Society, 38(2), 93–117.
[18] van Dijck, J., & Nieborg, D. B. (2009). Wikinomics and its discontents: A critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos. New Media & Society, 11(5), 855–874.
[19] Kelty, C. (2005). "Geeks, social imaginaries, and recursive publics." Cultural Anthropology 20(2) 185-214.
[20] Coleman, E. G. (2013). Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton University Press.