PLATFORM
The PLATFORM group met regularly in 2023 and 2024 to discuss, describe and examine the expansion, rise, and influence of “the platform” in global society. Scholars sought to incite scholarly thinking across platforms of different kinds, and in different mediums—including analog, electronic, and virtual—to explore the norms and practices that organize, permeate, and stem from them.
A platform operates across devices and experiences, de-emphasizing form in favor of content. A platform can be a foundation for political ideology, a web-based application for discourse, a system yielding multifaceted biomedical and communicative ends, and more. From a social science perspective, a platform can be understood as an infrastructure for action, an architecture or affordance that enables and constrains social, economic, and political possibilities, and conditions how we represent and experience the world.
Reading, thinking, and writing on individual projects and collectively, the PLATFORM group explored these issues and questions: Platforms have become default archives for both personal and institutional artifacts like data, text, sound, and images. Whose history is being preserved and whose is lost? How does exclusion from a platform—such as the deplatforming of controversial nations or figures, and particular forms of speech—highlight its power?
What historical, technological, theoretical, and policy perspectives and methodologies are key for understanding platforms and how they operate in academia, government, and industry, as well as in the physical world and in the realm of social relations? In what ways do platforms—such as biomedical technologies—structure, reorganize, and consolidate science, knowledge, and markets? How does the dominance of private platforms produce inequality—including along vectors of race, gender, class, nation, and region—and compel reimaginings of public infrastructure? How do today’s platforms differ from the social infrastructures and architectures of the past?
In 2023 and 2024, the PLATFORM group considered how “the platform” occupies both conceptual and empirical registers. Platforms seem to assemble capabilities, users, and interests and thereby set new futures in motion. Platforms are architectures for action that enable and constrain social, cultural, economic, and political possibilities, and shape how we structure, represent, and experience the world. Platforms are socio-technical infrastructures that can coordinate, consolidate, extend, and empower the activities of individuals, communities, corporations, and other actors. Members of the PLATFORM group explored the gravity of this form across humanistic and social science perspectives, advancing five theses about how platforms simultaneously attract and repulse social action.