Session Chair: Robert Gorwa
Presentation 1
Beyond the State-Centred Lens: Exploring the Infrastructualization of Platforms in China: The Case Of WeChat
Jiaxun Li
University of Warwick, United Kingdom
This paper looks beyond the state-centred lens and focuses on the issues of ‘infrastructuralisation of platform’(Helmond et al., 2019; Plantin et al., 2018) in China. There is a noticeable trend towards infrastructural development in dominant digital platforms in China. WeChat serves as a prime example, showcasing widespread usage, an expanding array of integrated services, and deep integration into various aspects of Chinese society (Plantin and de Seta, 2019). The paper aims to delve into the intricacies of infrastructural presence and the social implications of infrastructural power in the Chinese context, responding to de Seta's (2023) call to conceptualize the development of digital technologies in China through infrastructural thinking and Shen’s (2022) invitation to explore Chinese internet perspectives beyond authoritarian control and state intervention narratives. My analysis of a mix of documents reveals that WeChat aggregates personal data to construct comprehensive databases, likely used for WeChat Pay Score—a mechanism assigning users a personal numerical ranking to evaluate 'creditability.' This rating system influences access to services, potentially providing economic or social perks. However, it also raises concerns about unjustified discrimination and reinforced social inequality, impacting some users disproportionately. Critically engaging with the infrastructuralization of WeChat offers a novel approach to researching Chinese social media platforms and enhances understanding of digital media issues in China.
Presentation 2
Connective coding: on the platformisation and deplatformisation of software development
Liliana Bounegru, Jonathan Gray
King's College London, United Kingdom
This paper contributes to the critical study of platformisation and deplatformisation of software development and how networked infrastructures commodify, configure and challenge relations between code, coders, communities, technologies, investors and industries. It explores the political economic and cultural dimensions of the platformisation of software development in the news industry with a case study on Github. It then examines how resistance to platformisation and counter-mobilisations in the context of free software, art and activism surface alternative arrangements for socialising software development imbued with other logics.
The paper proposes the concept of “connective coding” to characterise GitHub’s dominant modes of configuration and capitalisation of public repositories and profiles and the power relations that underpin it, whereby public software and project development work becomes assets in the platform economy that have the potential to be variously capitalised by the platform and its associated third-party ecosystem. This institutional perspective is complemented by an analysis of newsroom industry practices mediated by the platform and how GitHub modulates visibility in this space.
The second part of the paper reflects on efforts to deplatformise software development by examining various responses and counter-mobilisations partly prompted by Microsoft’s controversial purchase of Github. It reviews the development of alternative coding spaces such as Gogs, Gitea, Radicle and Forgejo, and the values, practices, concerns and communities associated with them. In doing so it contributes to conference themes pertaining to political economy, labour and resistance in digital industries.
Presentation 3
DIGITAL DISCONNECTION, THE BROKEN PROMISE OF ATTENTION, AND POTENTIAL FOR CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT: A CASE STUDY OF THE FOREST
Meilun Chen
Rutgers University, United States of America
At a time when the accessibility of digital media technology at any time enables individuals constantly and permanently exist in the digital connection, the public become more concerned with relationship between digital media, digital attention crisis and technology addiction. This research contributes to the analysis of an emerging branch of mobile app industry that claims to address this issue. Based on the walk-through method and semi-structured interviews with users of one of the most popular app in this industry, the Forest app, this study develops a more nuanced and multifaceted understanding of the "technicity of attention" (Bucher, 2012) that underpins the app and how it mediates users' conceptualization of their experiences and routines of this app. Despite the app’s broken promise of attention, the study observes that users' experience of failure and frustration helps to reveal the app's same logic of attention arrangement shared by attention economy, and creates the conditions for users to reflect on the connectivity paradox and the problematic oppositional relational structure between dependency and agency.
Presentation 4
Where my AI apps at? A historiographic approach to analyzing platform tools
Kaushar Mahetaji, David Nieborg
University of Toronto, Canada
The popular short-form video app TikTok is mainly discussed as a discrete app or in relation to its parent company ByteDance. This view neglects how TikTok and other ByteDance apps maintain and advance ByteDance’s highly complex app ecosystem. This paper, therefore, positions ByteDance-owned apps as both apps and “platform tools.” TikTok allows end-users to watch videos, allows creators to make and distribute content, advertisers to endorse products, and developers to build app features. As a platform tool, TikTok is a software-based resource that mediates “platformization,” extending TikTok’s economic, infrastructural, and governmental data-centric logic within and beyond ByteDance’s app ecosystem. Increasingly, ByteDance’s platform tools rely heavily on AI technology because of ByteDance’s early investments in AI technology and the growing interest such tools within the cultural industries. We survey ByteDance’s AI-powered platform tools alongside non-AI ones using systematic financial and infrastructural analysis, uncovering how ByteDance’s platform tools expand ByteDance as a “multi-sided,” “multi-layered,” and “multi-situated” platform. Platform tools, thus, facilitate growth along these three dimensions by encouraging platform dependence; interoperability and interdependence within ByteDance’s app ecosystem; and platformization, including “parallel platformization.” Our empirical work ultimately shows how ByteDance uses platform tools to accrue and operationalize infrastructural and economic power, and how apps have moved from discrete objects to interconnected clusters of platform tools.
