Summarizing two days of complex and nuanced of talks on the topic of platform politics is not exactly my idea of a wonderful task. Nor an easy one. Moreover, as a participant and co-organizer of other conferences in the Network politics project headed by professors Joss Hands and Jussi Parrika, this task is made all the more difficult as previous conferences, talks, and themes tended to overlap, well in my own mind at least.
Of the three events, however, the Platform Politics conference was probably the most focused in terms of its adherence if you will to the interplay between the event’s two guiding concepts. That said, keynote talks from Nick Couldry, Tizianna Terranova, and Nick Dyer Witheford in particular focused largely on social formations and subjectivities displaced and/or enabled by contemporary networked forms of politics. Felix Stalder, however, probably best summed up the entirety of the event with his taxonomy of approaches to study networked politics, which encompassed arguments that presupposed politics governing platforms, using platforms, or emanating from the particular architecture of specific platforms. It is this last point that I most related to, in part due to my own latent materialist and empirical tendencies and biases, but also because I believe this approach speaks to the need for a cross-platform approach to the study of networked politics. True, Facebook likes to work as a platform-all-to-its-own. Yet one cannot argue that Facebook, or any other platform, proprietory, open source, or otherwise, stands apart from the network. Facebook was often held up at the Platform Politics conference as the prototypical blackbox platform, the back-end code remaining a distant mythical string of commands and algorithms. I would argue however that from a cross-platform perpective, Facebook should also be understood as a ‘blackhole”, sucking in, devouring, and recoding digital objects (images, videos, etc) that fall into its gravitational sphere. One can only understand the particularities of Facebook, in other words, in its “social” context, as a narcissistic platform.
To conduct or critique platform politics, moreover, one needs to appreciate not only the decentered and distributed nature of social media platforms, in the context of other digital media (news, government, NGO, websites, mobile apps, etc), but also the intensely compressed interface space/time that social media sites delimit on their vertical tickers. User generated contributions on sites like Twitter and Facebook are buried moments after they appear on the top of interfaces and screens. Such compressed interface/time thus warrants, indeed, compels the tactical and rhetorical partisan to sustain the visible life of digital wares through the development of increasingly larger friend networks and followers who might potentially repost a partisan’s contribution. While social networks can play a significant ego/reputation engine for online political partisans, the networking of political content on and across platforms also takes into consideration social media sites and other online platforms that are not driven by social network algorithms, but by pre-existing and more traditional hierarchies of institutional politics. Politics remains in other words a tactical endeavour. In a network politics campaigns that take advantage of the affordances of connections, disconnections, links and logics among platforms (ability to embed content, or link campaigns to displayed search engine results for example) not only expand interface time, but also enact a political form of literacy, a platformativity that networks the political.
Greg Elmer, Cambridge May, 2011