Positions Season 2, Episode 4
Provocations for Platform Studies
by Chris Alen Sula
With Digital Platforms and Agency, coeditors Reed Van Schenck and Elaine Venter offer an antidote to both the technoutopianism of the preceding decades and the technopessimism that seems to have settled into popular culture, the feeling of resignation in the face of it all.1 The pace of technological change has been nothing if not breathtaking, along with its social, cultural, economic, and environmental consequences.
Thirty years ago, only one-third of US households had a computer, and less than 20 percent had access to the internet,2 a platform that was then typified by email, chat rooms, hand-curated index lists, and personal HTML sites built on Geocities, Tripod, and Angelfire. Today, 91 percent of adults in the US report having a smartphone.3 Globally, the pace and scale of technology adoption is even more staggering: Less than 1 percent of the global population had access to the internet in the 1990s.4 Today, around 70 percent of the global population owns a smartphone.5 People in the US spend between one and six hours each day on this device,6 which tracks our every movement and interaction and delivers a constant barrage of app notifications, news updates, influencers, advertisements, and various opportunities for work, dating, housing, education, entertainment, and more. AI is increasingly present throughout this ecosystem, from the way we search for information to the slop content we see and even interactions with it.7
What can we do against this digital colossus, with its endless appetites for our attention, labor, and resources and its vast powers of identification, targeting, and persuasion?
Digital Platforms and Agency comes not to point out or solve these problems, but rather to complicate, interrupt, and even transform them. Centering questions of race, gender, and ability, the articles in this special section explore gentrification through Airbnb, visibility and representation on TikTok, anxieties surrounding voice assistants, digital matchmaking practices, intimacy between livestreamers and their fans, authenticity and anti-bot vigilantism on Instagram, “free speech” branding on “alt-tech” social media platform Gab, and post-racial rhetoric surrounding Apple’s Face ID. Across these case studies, people and communities are neither completely helpless against the power of platforms, nor are they above or outside of platforms, capable of overturning all of the logics of these platforms or escaping them altogether—even nonusers can be affected by economic, environmental, and other consequences of digital capitalism. We use and are used by these platforms.
Together, the articles in the special section, along with Van Schenck and Venter’s reflections in this episode, point to how we should begin to think differently about platforms. Here, I weave together their insights with some of the ideas and texts that have animated my graduate seminar on information, technology, and culture over the past decade—think of this as a guided tour through my syllabus, told in relation to the themes of the special section. I also come to this response as former cochair (2014–17) of the New Media & Digital Cultures Working Group of the Cultural Studies Association. I recognize myself as an early adopter of many technologies and interested in prospects for their creative and political use8 and, in other times and contexts, as engaged in practices of resistance and refusal9 of the very same or other technologies. Platforms are not simple, and neither are we as users/nonusers.
How to Study a Platform
Digital Platforms and Agency and this episode offer a cultural studies framing of platform studies that attends to structures such as race, gender, and ability, as well as the lived experience of platforms. This approach resists generalizations (e.g., the platform is in control, all users are the same, all users participate in the same way) and insists on specificity in considering who is using a platform, and how. Two decades ago, a similar approach marked a significant turn in internet studies.10
Early discourse about the internet often focused on cyberspace and digital life, as separate from actual space and everyday life, and celebrated users’ ability to take on different personas in anonymous settings.11 This view is perhaps best characterized by Peter Steiner’s New Yorker cartoon-turned-meme, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”12 In time, scholars came to recognize, as Christine Hine puts it, that “‘The Internet’ was not in fact a single cultural artefact, but many different cultural artefacts depending on the people who were using it.”13 As work by Lisa Nakamura14 and others revealed, earlier accounts that were silent on race and gender (among other oversights) in fact disguised an assumed straight, white, cis male user, with all the privileges pertaining thereto. More recent scholarship has extended this approach to other platforms, such as Safiya Umoja Noble’s work on search algorithms,15 Ruha Benjamin’s on coded logics,16 Joy Buolamwini’s on facial recognition,17 and Meredith Broussard’s on technological infrastructures in sectors from education and health care to the criminal justice system,18 among others.
Together, these scholars, and the editors and authors of Digital Platforms and Agency, demand an intersectional approach to platform studies. Here, I borrow from Sasha Constanza-Chock’s19 use of the “matrix of domination,” a term coined by Patricia Hill Collins to describe race, class, and gender as interlocking systems of oppression.20 The matrix of domination is both reproduced in platforms, through design choices, content moderation policies (or lack thereof), algorithmic bias, and other means, and reproduced by them, externally in the real world. Nina Medvedeva’s contribution to the section offers a helpful example of this relationship: Airbnb hosts in Black neighborhoods in Washington, DC, are penalized by racist guests’ low-star reviews, leading to less visibility in search results and, in turn, financial losses. In this example, historical redlining and digital redlining work in tandem to reproduce racism and discrimination.
The matrix of domination, while clearly applicable to cases like structural racism, is also subtle in its approach to power. Within parts of this system, individuals are multiply positioned, affording them relative degrees of freedom and constraint:
The overarching matrix of domination houses multiple groups, each with varying experiences with penalty and privilege that produce corresponding partial perspectives, situated knowledges, and, for clearly identifiable subordinate groups, subjugated knowledges. No one group has a clear angle of vision. No one group possesses the theory or methodology that allows it to discover the absolute ‘truth’ or, worse yet, proclaim its theories and methodologies as the universal norm evaluating other groups’ experiences.21
For platform studies, this suggests not only attention to specific communities and identities but also to different epistemologies. In this episode, Van Schenck and Venter note that quantitative analysis—often dominant in platform studies, especially for platforms that offer data streams to researchers and therefore receive outsized attention—might be suitable for some projects, while others may require discourse analysis, rhetorical criticism, or different tools. One approach (or platform) should not dominate the field.
The matrix of domination also provides a useful lens for thinking about the power of platforms and those who own them, those who manage them, and those who design them. As Van Schenck says here, “The platform is only as powerful as the political environment allows it to be.” Consider, for example, the recent landmark verdict that Meta and YouTube’s addictive features harmed a young user by causing her anxiety and depression,22 and how it might come to apply to other populations and even the design of platforms themselves. Legislation, regulation, litigation, consumer groups, and grassroots efforts all work to constrain the power of platforms, in addition to the simple fact that platforms are nothing without us (i.e., if we do not use them). Strategies of refusal, evasion, co-option, jamming, interruption, hacking, and the like can all return power to users—though it must be noted that these tactics are not always used for good; agency and liberation are not the same thing.
To these provocations offered by Van Schenck and Venter, I add two others that are not explicitly considered by most of the articles in Digital Platforms and Agency but complement and are in broad solidarity with them: attention to the so-called Global South and to the environmental consequences of platforms.
Platform studies often centers the US and Europe, and the so-called Global North more broadly. Part of this legacy stems from where platforms have been developed and regulated, where the companies who own them are located, and where early user bases formed—all of which are related to access to computing technology and, in a wider frame, the legacies of colonialism. There is also some locus of attention on China, though it is often oversimplified or misunderstood,23 and growing interest in India, given its large population and democratic political system. Beyond these world powers, there is little attention paid to other areas of the world, where raw materials are extracted for platforms—we’ll come back to this in a moment—and where companies increasingly turn for their digital taskwork, such as content moderation.24 A notable exception here is the MIT Technology Review series AI Colonialism, which offers case studies of private surveillance companies in South Africa, the exploitation of app workers in Venezuela, collective strategies among motorbike taxi drivers in Jakarta, and a Māori tribe’s efforts to preserve their language.25 These and other works shed light on how these and other areas have become a testing ground for platform logics that are later deployed elsewhere around the world—as well as tactics for resisting them.
Platform logics are inextricably linked to colonial logics, which have perpetrated cultural, social, epistemological, and environmental harms—past and ongoing. Platforms, as a form of infrastructure, rely on and are built upon other infrastructures, such as power grids, supply chains, rare-earth mining, and various kinds of labor. Kate Crawford26 and others have documented these dependencies for a number of technologies, especially AI, and their impacts on the environment, including manufacturing, shipping, and end-user waste. More recent attention on data centers; their use of resources like electricity and water; and their contribution to local heat, pollution, and global climate change27 brings home the fact that platforms are made up of more than just content and users. They are very material, as is the labor behind them.
Final Thoughts
Beyond the contributions this episode makes to platform studies, I am grateful for the attention it gives to editorial labor and mechanisms of scholarly communication that are often unknown and unrecognized. Van Schenck and Venter, together with host Delores Phillips, lead us down the winding path from 2023 Cultural Studies Association Conference Working Group submissions to their editorial vision for the special section, the process of soliciting peer reviewers and working with authors through revisions, and ultimately their publication in 2025 of a subset of the work they started with at the beginning of the process.
This tour helps to demystify the process of publication for those new to or outside of academic publishing, and makes visible the labor and care required by scholarly editing. Van Schenck and Venter also offer useful advice for graduate students and first-time editors, from asking for feedback and resubmitting proposals to giving a shot to new authors whose work might need polish but speaks centrally to editorial vision. They encourage all of us to think beyond our disciplinary and methodological boundaries and form connections across fields.
This brings me to a final provocation for platform studies: we should use every method and means at our disposal to analyze, amplify, and extend our reach and impact—the platforms themselves certainly are.
Audio Transcript
[00:00:00] Delores B. Phillips: Welcome to Positions, the podcast of the Cultural Studies Association, sponsored and published through the open source journal, Lateral. Positions aims to provide critical reflection and examination on topics in cultural studies for scholars, students, and a general audience. Make sure to follow CSA and Lateral journal on socials and subscribe to our podcast to keep up with new episodes.
[00:00:27] Delores: In this episode, we’re joined by Drs. Reed Van Schenck and Elaine Venter, editors for Lateral‘s special edition, Digital Platforms and Agency. The section is a collection of author works focusing on the tensions between the encroachment of digital platforms on cultures by immensely powerful technology companies, and the emergence of possibilities as people work, play, and express themselves on these platforms. We ask and answer through the works, what does human agency look like in an age where it seems we are controlled by platforms and their algorithms? Enjoy the discussion.
[00:01:06] Delores: I’m your host Dolores Phillips. I am the director of the African, African American, and Diaspora Studies Center at James Madison University. I’m also Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature and Theory, and Vice President of the Cultural Studies Association.
[00:01:21] Reed Van Schenck: My name is Reed Van Schenck. I’ve coedited Digital Platforms and Agency. I’m an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media at IE University in Madrid, and I am also cochair of the New Media and Digital Cultures working group of the Cultural Studies Association.
[00:01:38] Elaine Venter: Hi, everyone, my name is Dr. Elaine Venter. I am one of the co-editors for the special edition. I am also a Lecturer at Kennesaw State University at the School of Communication and Media, and the soon-to-be Director of the Center of Sustainable Journalism.
[00:01:53] Delores: So, can you tell us the inspiration for this particular journal issue?
[00:01:57] Reed: Yeah. Flashback all the way to 2023, simpler times. In the New Media and Digital Cultures working group, we always like to bounce around different ideas for what we can do with the submissions that we receive for the annual conference. And an idea emerged within one of our semesterly meetings that we should put together a special section on digital platforms and agency, since so many of the submissions that year were centered around these themes. And so, the working group put its heads together. Elaine and I kind of stepped up to the plate in order to shepherd this thing to some sort of conclusion, neither of us having editorial experience, and we put together a call for papers on digital platforms and agency. From there we sent it far and wide, and, you know—how many submissions did we end up getting?
[00:02:53] Elaine: I believe, Reed, that we got close to seventy.
[00:02:55] Reed: Yeah, that sounds about right. And, you know, from there we had to narrow it down. We wanted the section to be short enough where many people could really actually read all the articles but, you know, long enough to include as many different voices and points of view and platforms as possible. So, I think we accepted somewhere around twelve, thirteen abstracts out of our received pool, and then from there eight managed to make it to publication, which is finally coming out just now if you’re listening as this podcast is released.
[00:03:28] Elaine: I just also want to give a great shout-out to Mark Nunes, who was our former cochair for the New Media and Digital Cultures working group, who really instituted this culture of: after a conference, what do we do next? I think that’s so important. A lot of people are part of academic organizations where, you know, we pay money to be a part of these things, and the big question is: you go to a conference, maybe you get a paper presented, a paper already published, but what happens afterwards? And so, there’s this great support network that’s been built to actually help—it’s a great mentorship. There’s a group mentorship program, and Mark really worked very hard to help develop projects after the fact, whether it’s something that you needed to continue to a new conference or for something like this, looking at what we could develop into special editions, and I think that’s something incredibly special that I just don’t see at a lot of particular institutions. And I know it’s difficult work because it’s all volunteer work, so just a special shout-out there. And I don’t get any extra credit points because I’m not in any of his courses, and he’s not even a chair or co-chair anymore, so there’s not even brownie points at this point.
[00:04:27] Delores: So, can you tell us more about the process, about the author works that you solicited and received, about the way that the issue came about?
[00:04:36] Reed: Yeah, I think when we arrived at this intersection of platforms and agency—I don’t know about you, Elaine, but for me, agency was kind of the easy one, because we saw a lot of similar areas in the Cultural Studies [Association] conference that year coalescing around these ideas of the human, nonhuman binary, virtual, actual, the role of human relationality and infrastructure, dealing with questions of identity that often get left out of the sort of hegemonic approach to platform studies. So for me, that inclusion was kind of the easy part. I think conceptualizing platforms was more difficult, which is not surprising coming from a bunch of pedantic media scholars that are going to argue about what a platform is. But, you know, something that was clear to us is that we didn’t want it to necessarily just be, you know, Facebook, Instagram, social media platforms as Web 2.0 scholarship traditionally conceives of them. We wanted there to be space for infrastructures that go beyond, you know, the sort of user interface social media platform. We wanted there to be space for the data economies. We wanted there to be space for platforms like Airbnb, for example, which features very prominently in one of our author’s works, and other platforms that we don’t think of as being necessarily as expressive places where agency is most readily seen. So a lot of the initial work went into forming a call for papers—artificial intelligence as well, of course, although we didn’t end up publishing an AI [paper]—we formed a call for papers that invited scholars who are interested in all these types of platforms to recognize that their work would, would have a space in this section.
[00:06:16] Elaine: Yeah, that was really interesting for me as well as someone who both works and teaches in social media especially. It was so easy to see how social media had become a predominant focus of platforming, especially when we teach media in schools. We’re teaching about content creation and development predominantly on your mainstream media. Any time I teach my content creation course, there’s always a matter of, like, which apps, which platforms, are going to make the cut this year, and it’s always the ones that are, you know, we looked at monetization. I didn’t want that to be the only defining point of platforms, and Reed and I very much agreed on that concept because we also saw that at the 2023 conference with all the different kind of presentations. Also, from what we saw in mainstream media, what was being covered—Alexa and privacy security, concerns over those kinds of uses of weaker AI, but also as a platform itself was becoming a search form itself, was becoming very interesting.
[00:07:09] And so it was really looking at how do we complicate—I wouldn’t necessarily say complicate, but how do we expand on—the popularized definitions of platforms? And I really enjoyed looking at work from Alexander Galloway, which Reed was also very well versed in, and so we kind of brought that together. One thing that was also very important for us, which I love as a mission for what we do in cultural studies, is multidimensional and interdisciplinary learning and research. So, it was super important for us that we didn’t just get work from just cultural studies people. Yes, we wanted cultural studies work, or cultural studies-emphasized work, or work that could expand cultural studies, but we really tried to open it to every—like, you’re a scientist in computer science? Heck yeah, we want your work. Bring it in! We could help you frame it in the way that we need it for cultural studies. But we wanted to see what other takes would be from this that maybe we were missing from our own perspectives, because that was one of the challenges, too, making sure that the work wasn’t mired in our own biases, pedagogical and/or personal, in order to create an ask that was really focused but also open at the same time.
[00:08:13] Delores: And that sounds like such a meaningful intervention because of the valuable shifting away from an expansion of authorship and inclusiveness, and also the way that the framing ends up expanding. Because it seems to be moving away from this kind of “extraction as politics” that characterizes the relationship between platforms and users, where users become a product or users are commodified. It seems as if that’s really a very limiting way to think about it. And it gets at my next question, where we’re thinking about the question of agency. How did your edition frame agency? How did it frame expansions of agency? Can you talk about that a little bit?
[00:08:52] Reed: I love the point you made about extractive politics because we were actually thinking about that when we were considering our ethos as editors in relation to this thing that we’re describing as agency. If we are telling our authors: “This is the argument you need to make about agency so that it fits our predetermined position in the constant cultural studies debate between structure, culture, and agency, in order to make our own careers look a lot better,” then where would the agency of our authors be? Where would their unique perspective be, right? I think the way that we thought about agency not only was part of the practice of putting this special section together—really letting even the disagreements in between the articles shine, not presenting, you know, one story that everybody’s going to accept, a pluriversal perspective on the relationship between platforms and agency—but also one that’s rooted within the different perspectives that folks within cultural studies have taken towards the question of agency.
[00:09:49] Reed: Elaine, it was actually your idea to frame our approach towards the relationship between platforms and agency around Beth Coleman’s notion of “race as technology,” and the appropriation of the tools that are sort of afforded as racialized people engage with platforms in kind of experimental ways as the starting point for our approach to agency. We found that to be a generative place to start because Coleman is not taking sort of a strong, I guess, deterministic stance on what agency is, what platforms are. The meaning of those terms comes at the point of contact, comes at the point of experimentation, and that’s what we wanted our authors to be able to do, right? We wanted them to take their own case study, whether it’s in literary studies or media studies or rhetoric—whether it’s a mundane sort of infrastructural platform like Alexa, or a rancorous, evil, white nationalist platform like Gab—or TikTok—and be able to see what agency means in those particular contexts with those particular bodies towards, you know, the actions that they’re attempting to do. So to make a long story short, I feel like we don’t really stake a flag down on what agency must be all the time, and I think that’s really the generative part of this project, and I hope folks agree when they read the articles in conversation with each other.
[00:11:13] Elaine: I’d like to expand on what Reed said here because it’s really important, too, I think, in the basing that we had. So many people have written about agency before us. This is not anything new. It’s not really anything revolutionary. What we’re doing is bringing in takes that might not have been seen otherwise, or opening up positions, because you can never really talk enough about this kind of thing because the thing is: platforms are changing all the time. In fact, just from the time that we have actually collected all these works—got the asks, got the reviews in, and everything—there are now already new elements that I would have loved to have put in. Ragebait, for example, which wasn’t really something that was discussed when we were at this process, which brings in whole other questions about agency and platform. Australia just banned social media use for under sixteens, and they’re actually applying it; [there’s] enforcement there. So, there are other questions there that weren’t necessarily at the time in terms of that. And so, we’re not saying that platforms are evil or bad necessarily, and we’re not saying that agency is free form. It’s not like there is this political activism that’s going to completely use up and change social media. If that was the case, it already would have happened, or any platform for that case. We were saying that there are rooms for both, but what does that look like? And so, I think that was important in terms of not necessarily staking a claim on either/or but pushing also the boundaries between these continued tensions of technological determinism and the power of human control over these platforms because we’re not denying the power of these platforms either. That’s important for people to realize, too.
[00:12:42] Elaine: I think both Reed and I are probably more hopeful than what either of us probably even thought. I’m not sure. We’ll see at the end of this, but I think we’re more hopeful at least that there could be more control for agency that some people might even realize or take into consideration. But that’s not denying, though, the harm that can still be done by platforms and the actual control of one’s agency and even straight up manipulation that can happen with many of these platforms.
[00:13:11] Delores: And also, different forms of agency, how agency can take different forms, and how it can assert itself in unexpected ways. I’m very eager to see how that works out in the edition. One of the points I thought that you made that was incredibly interesting and valuable was when you characterized agency as flows of capacity that constitutively shape digital infrastructure and culture as opposed to a possession, as opposed to even an exercise. So, thinking about it as a flow seems to be incredibly generative and crucial to informing the approach to the definitions that emerge from the edition.
[00:13:46] Reed: Mm-hmm. And I think the important part of the language of flow, uh, when we kind of, uh, it’s often sort of seen as: If it’s flowing, if it’s moving, if it’s changing, that means it must be uncapturable and totally great all the time. And that’s sometimes the case, but if you know anything about the economics of platforms, you’d know that flows of agency can also be subjected to capture. They can be monetized. Creative disruption, for example, is all based on constant momentum—move fast and break things. I think this characterization is loaded, certainly. It’s loaded with ideas that in the context of platform infrastructure, literally where data is coming from—movement and expression—and that very movement and expression can be subject to the same type of capture that we tend to associate with more static, unchanging forms of agency as well. So not only is it just, like, more accurate to how platforms work, it’s also, from my point of view, an important intervention that cultural studies can offer to the fields of platform studies, which unfortunately do tend to see a sort of, you know, of course a technological deterministic angle taking the forefront, in which the infrastructures are the ones in [00:15:00] control and the agents are just the things that get moved around. They become these basic level specifications rather than being constitutive of the infrastructure itself. I think when you read the section, this really comes together in a plurality of different ways throughout the author’s work, and I hope that scholars within cultural studies and outside of cultural studies can really take that to heart in terms of thinking about how to conceptualize agency on platforms, and of platforms too.
[00:15:32] Elaine: It’s the one thing I actually really enjoy about cultural studies: the study of power, because I think that really speaks to that flow and flexibility as well, because that’s what then complicates technological determinism, right? Because it’s this question of, well, if it’s going to be technological superiority, who’s actually pushing that? Because that’s the interesting thing: technology “evolution” is not neutral. It’s not like it’s just happening itself, which is exactly, though, the argument that I believe technological determinism tries to make: that it is part of this natural evolution, and we are just kind of stuck in it. But at the same time, cultural studies comes in and says: sociopolitical culture is driven by several different factors of power And the point is actually done really well by one of our authors, [Nina] Medvedeva, who says: the platform is only as powerful as the political environment allows it to be. And I love that because that doesn’t necessarily mean government. The political environment is constituted by a bunch of different factors, from corporations to users, players, subscribers, members, people, and of course the government. And they always come into play, and there are other factors that might come in, to then look at what happens, what kind of technological aspects becomes prioritized versus not. So, there are lots of things to be said there about this flow, and I love that that kind of element brings that out to complicate that.
[00:16:57] Delores: So, let’s talk a little bit about the selection of the authors.
[00:17:00] Reed: I think when we were considering the inclusion, we had so many different abstracts that were of immensely high quality and we couldn’t just pick like the top fifteen because we wanted to make sure that the special edition, for one, included a variety of platforms, but also included a variety of scholars coming at core questions in cultural studies from various disciplinary perspectives. We didn’t want to just have, for example, fifteen media studies scholars. Some of our priorities, for example, were A) We really didn’t want most of the articles to focus on one social media platform such as Facebook or Instagram. There’s actually—for example, in my field I conduct research on right-wing extremism on the internet—there is a robust amount of research that suggests certain platforms that have readily accessible academic API, such as R.I.P. Twitter and Reddit, are horrendously over-represented in the scholarship. Why? Well, because they have transparent academic API. It is easy to conduct research on them. So, we wanted to look at platforms that are harder to research and in order to sort of correct for those tendencies that not only exist in my subfield but in, in many others.
[00:18:23] Reed: So, we selected a wide variety of articles. I think we, at most we only had two at any given time that were examining the same platform. Another consideration that came to mind—we didn’t use this to determine who we selected, but it was an important measure on the scale—was making sure there was a wide variety of different approaches being represented. We wanted to ensure that especially approaches that have been marginalized in platform studies scholarship were brought to the forefront in this special section. We definitely wanted to include feminist, critical queer, disability, and critical race perspectives that are often treated as marginal within platform studies. And so that was a major in part of our selection criteria as well. Unfortunately, not all of the abstracts that we selected made it to the end, of course. Like any other journal article, it goes through peer review when it is selected because we selected abstracts and then the authors had to write their articles, and then it had to go through double-blind peer review like anyone else. So, we didn’t get to reflect all of the different approaches. For example, game studies and AI studies are some key platforms that we were not able to display in the final selection of articles. But our selection criteria tried to be as inclusive and representative of the field as possible while also doing justice to parts of the field that it has marginalized.
[00:19:52] Elaine: It was really strange being on this side of the table of this process I’m used to just submitting stuff. And let me tell you, I would just like to send out a word of encouragement to anybody who applies, and I just want to let you know that you don’t know the variety of reasons why your abstract didn’t get selected. There’s actually so much more that goes into it than just: It wasn’t good. And here’s the thing. Some people might argue, “Well, why isn’t it just merit-based?” The problem goes back to the ask. What was the actual– our own abstract that we had to develop—what was the mission and goal [and] the objectives of the special edition? Which is both in terms of Lateral, since we were writing this for Lateral for the CSA. There’s a mission, value, and a direction that comes from that, and we have to be respectful of that, as well as then a mission, value, and objective that comes from the actual work that we were trying to develop from this.
[00:20:39] Elaine: In looking at all of these abstracts, we oftentimes had to come back to: We have several good papers, but then having to weigh them, which one reflects best to these particular qualities? So, it doesn’t mean any of the papers weren’t bad or good necessarily. If I could, I would have accepted every single one, and that’s not just because I’m a bleeding heart—but my students know I’m pretty much a bleeding heart—but the fact is that they were just so incredible. But at the same time, there are also limits. Not everybody is going to sit and read eighteen submitted essay special edition, right? Even regular editions don’t always cover that many types of articles, which is why they’re usually spread out. So, if you do ever submit to a special edition and you don’t get accepted, don’t get down. See if you can get a review. We do try to get—we tried. The first round is very difficult to get reviews to everybody. Trying to get review to everyone for abstracts for almost seventy abstracts when we are also carrying both our full-time jobs, we didn’t get to all of that. But we did try to get reviews to the second, third, fourth rounds that we had going through. But there’s nothing wrong with—If anybody had emailed me to ask why I didn’t get accepted, absolutely I’d take the time to write an email and let you know. So, email them and see if they’ll give you some feedback, because you’d be surprised what that feedback might give you, and it might even help you improve for the next submission. And then try again. Find another home or another place for that piece of work. There is a place for it eventually, it’s just a matter of trying to find it. That was really a very interesting learning experience for me on this side of things.
[00:22:06] Reed: You gave me the idea to also speak to the point of view of people who might be looking to edit a special edition of a journal for their first time, or an edited volume, because I was a little daunted by the task at first, but now having gone through it, well, of course we could say many practical things, but on the point that you were just talking about: it’s okay to have an editorial vision! You don’t just have to select the best names that are going to get the most traffic. You don’t have to select the top fifteen that you know are going to be really, really good. Giving a shot to graduate student authors who may not have the most polished idea, but it fits perfectly, and you know that, with care, it’ll be really, really great. It’s okay to go out of your disciplinary boundaries and invite folks to submit, [who] are going to need to be tailored and framed a bit, but you know, again, will just provide an interesting point of view. You don’t have to be methodical and go one by one by one on a rubric. You’re not grading undergraduates. You’re producing a work of scholarship. I feel like honestly, if I had sort of accepted that fact earlier on, I would have felt a lot less guilt when it came to sending a lot of emails about rejection . . . and probably written the introduction a little easier too.
[00:23:23] Elaine: We had a bit of a crisis. I think at one point there was a crisis of, “Oh, we’re doing poorly? We feel so bad about this.” And then we both did have to come to the conclusion, we had many good mentors too though who we could turn to, and realized no. It’s like we said: having that editorial vision is actually what gives your editorial structure and what gives it that necessary focus point to then actually include works that are going to make for an excellent, rounded-out point, even as they are a bunch of different works that might not even look related.
[00:23:54] Delores: This edition raises such an impressive range of questions, and we have a few perhaps that respond to the questions that the edition raises. In what way has the meteoric rise of digital platforms affected the scope, scale, and impact of the research that you encountered?
[00:24:14] Reed: There’s at least three angles to tackle that question, and the one that comes to mind immediately for me is a methodological question, especially because the methods we’re used to dealing with in cultural studies—unless you’re, like, a digital humanities wizard, which I am not—deal with looking at something, usually long form text, really, really, really closely. Digital platforms just by their very nature produce more text, faster text, less meaningful text, and more functional text—text that’s doing something, for example, an LLM prompt rather than a manuscript. How do we adjust the way that we read in order to attend to what text is doing on digital platforms, to attend to the different ways it’s reflecting our subject positions, affecting our subject positions in so many different and really scary ways?
[00:25:10] Reed: I think in the edition, you see authors taking a wide variety of methodological approaches from, um, André Brock’s critical technocultural discourse analysis, which the [Zari A.] Taylor and [Kiara] Childs piece uses to analyze hashtags on TikTok, to racial rhetorical criticism used to analyze the finer points of content moderation policy on a reactionary website, to the analysis of creepypasta, which is sort of like a pop literature, pop horror stories that’s meant to be copied and pasted, so form is playing a bigger role than content in what that genre means and what it does. So, you see people parlaying with methods that we are familiar with but remixing them and retooling them to these radically different and interesting contexts. There’s much more to be said to answer that question, but to me, I think that’s the answer that cultural studies still has a lot of work to formalize what we mean when we talk about digital methods.
[00:26:09] Delores: What should the field of platform studies learn from cultural studies, and in particular from their research?
[00:26:15] Reed: Well, platform studies does not have a political impetus in the way that cultural studies does, and I really think it should. I don’t think there’s a neutral way to study the platform, because the platform is not neutral. The idea that there is a technological artifact that can be specified to each individual subject, in their each individual way, [that can] be completely interoperable with the rest of the world so that it could be conveniently read by whoever owns the platform for whatever purpose that person may have, that can’t be an apolitical definition. It’s simply not possible in a world where power defines the relationship between all of those actors involved. I think there’s a lot that platform studies can learn from cultural studies, and our authors bring out so many fine points of that question. But I think what unites so many of their answers is the imperative to politicize research, and to not assume that when we’re looking at something that wants to appear neutral, such as a platform, that in reality it actually is neutral. It almost never is. And being careful of those biases that platforms have, biases that algorithms have, to parlay with Ruha Benjamin, I think would dramatically strengthen platform studies.
[00:27:33] Delores: Reed, your point about neutrality. As someone who is deeply skeptical of how platforms and power are integrated with each other, I sometimes view the illusion of neutrality emerging as an almost purposeful tactic And so cultural studies and platform studies have a duty to recognize the strategies of political neutrality when we see political entities using these platforms and politicizing these platforms. And I’m thinking—I’m going well beyond the big platforms such as X, which has been clearly politicized. I’m going well beyond Telegram, going well beyond Gab . . . and Truth Social. I’m moving into gaming platforms, for example, which have this illusion of neutrality, which itself ends up being caught up in politics of difference in really interesting and sometimes rather negative ways, rather destructive ways. So that sensibility of building in a logic of political recognition seems to be very critical in our moment right now.
[00:28:36] Reed: That’s an incredible point, and such an important one too. It is a tactic. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act dictates that platforms basically have the right to, but undertake no duty to, legislate content, to regulate content, because they are essentially neutral intermediaries. So the maintenance of that fantasy is, especially because most of these platforms are based in the United States, where [Section] 230 is relevant, is an important part of the big tech’s legal defense to maintain a laissez-faire state of platform governance, which then gets exported to the rest of the world through things like malicious lawfare against the European Union and Latin America, among other odious tactics, avoiding [General Data Protection Regulation] compliance, malicious compliance.
[00:29:26] Reed: And you’re right that it’s not just the alt-tech platforms. In fact, I think those are small potatoes when we’re talking about the effect that the internet has had on radicalization among, you know, just the pervasive, terrible, sorry state of social life that we’re all sort of dealing with. It’s not just coming from these small platforms like Gab and Truth Social. Telegram is not a small platform, but that one either. WhatsApp and Facebook, these platforms that present themselves as being sort of free forums for deliberation are in fact governed with very political strategy and tactics. Something that you can’t say in your employer’s face is something you can say in a WhatsApp group chat, because those things are not regulated, and that itself is a political imperative that brings people towards different forms of antagonistic sociality almost as a habit. So, you’re absolutely right, and I think a platform studies that leans into the political work that platforms are already doing in the way that cultural studies has done for culture for its entire existence is necessary here and now.
[00:30:31] Delores: What should the field of platform studies learn about the relationship between human agency and platforms?
[00:30:36] Elaine: And this is from Beth Coleman’s “X-reality” space. I know it might seem a little outdated in some, or it might seem simplistic to some people, but it’s very difficult to capture the nuances and complexities of the whole thing, which is why it’s such an interesting and good concept. Because the X-reality makes it sound like there’s this really clean overlap, and that’s not what it is. That’s actually what is so increasingly interesting about platforms—how we use the word ubiquity quite a lot when we talk about the penetration of digital life and platforms in our life. I mean, I’m going to be honest with you: I’ve started talking to Siri. Not, like, in a friend way, but I’ve started using Siri in a way that I hadn’t recently in several years because of some of the feature changes that have made life a little bit more useful and convenient. There’s that key word, right? And so, it makes me feel like I have decided this for myself, to use the more convenient route in terms of that. And so that’s very interesting, the pervasive nature of digital platforms and human agency, that it’s making us feel that we’ve really made the choice for this. So, I don’t—I want to be careful about getting into technological determinism, because it makes it feel like technology has decided this for us and whatnot, but it’s true, we do have choice. It’s just, though, when it’s so ubiquitous and so ingrained. Now, this is from the nonnneutral choices, though, of other people. Individual actions that play into larger actions. When government systems like healthcare have so integrated digital systems to do the thing, how are you supposed to be able to actually separate yourself and choose a disconnected option? When all of the ways of doing life, buying, selling, education, has been so integrated into these digital platforms, that I feel like there’s a complication there, or that continued tension about human agency and platforms.
[00:32:21] Reed: The only thing I would add to what you’ve just said is: I think that goes to show that whenever we’re talking about agency, we need to be very precise about what we’re discussing. Because when we use agency in a colloquial sense, we often think of, like, the sort of I think, therefore I am type of agency, where if it’s coming from my brain, that means I know it’s a true and honest expression of me. But can we really say that’s the case when, for example, I feel myself getting frustrated when ChatGPT isn’t exactly as responsive as it’s promised for me, or when I see myself talking to Siri and I enjoy the feeling of convenience that that provides for me? There’s obviously something a little bit more complicated going on there, but I wouldn’t say it’s not agency. So, there’s sort of a “hard” agency that’s always for me 100 percent of the time, and then there’s a more “soft,” mediated type of agency. And really maybe as someone who has kind of been influenced by Lacan for a long time, and thinks the first one’s not really possible, that aside, I’m much more interested in the second version of agency, the sense of agency as always mediated, agency as being part of infrastructure rather than just something that infrastructure moves around. And I think that being precise about what we’re talking about when we invoke agency, and making sure that the type of agency we’re invoking is actually a thing that is real, that exists, and is not just a fantasy of agency that we tell ourselves in moments when we actually don’t have any agency at all.
[00:33:52] Delores: And that gets back to your very salient point about agency being defined as capacity and flow, as opposed to possession and even exercise or imposition, because I wonder sometimes about the unleashed agency of some of these platforms and how that underwrites a certain neurosis that some of us might have about things like AI, where it seems agentic on its own, and not because of the way that it actually produces results. We’re thinking about the imposition of—or the way in which it influences and inflects everyday life and our own relationships with information. So an unleashed agency, an unleashed capacity, these flows don’t have to necessarily be uncontrolled, but the fantasy of control over these flows that ends up being manifested when there’s the realization or even the recognition that these flows are perhaps beyond our capacity to be able to control or be beyond the banks of whatever we want to use to limit them. I think that ends up becoming an important facet of what we’re discussing, because then it reminds me a little bit of an immaterial version of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, where she speaks about the way in which inanimate objects act upon us. So, what if we think about these animated, inanimate immaterial objects as having their own kind of capacity, their own sorts of flows that act upon us, and how can we subvert those flows? How can we expand capacity? How can we maneuver capacities? I’m thinking that that would be a way to understand differently the relationship between those who have power and ownership over those platforms and the user base.
[00:35:36] Reed: You know, something that the “bot police” article really gets to—to your point, Dolores—is that when we feel like we’ve lost our agency, when we neurotically are sort of trying to find this nostalgic agency, that is to say: something we thought we had in the past but we never actually did, that does tend to uniquely lend itself to this really revanchist sort of reactionary approach to objects. And in the “bot police” article that manifests as this sort of, you know, digital vigilantism and policing that’s basing so much of its work on the human/nonhuman binary in so many problematic and also interesting ways. But we see that in so many other places, from people complaining about AI taking their jobs all the way down to the grievances about content moderation that animate, for example, the takeover of Twitter and its transformation into X. So yeah, incredible point.
[00:36:45] Nathalie Schäfer: My article called “The Bot Police” dives deeply into this user-led platform governance of inauthenticity on Instagram. So, the bot police are Instagram users who have authorized themselves to police and govern so-called inauthentic behavior on the platform in form of botting and porn bots. In my previous research, I conceptualized the practice of botting and defined it as repetitive posting and engaging as well as disengaging on social media platforms that can either be performed manually or automatically. Porn bots are defined as automated or semi-automated software agents that operate by using sexual solicitation to capture attention. So, my research on botting and the Instagram bot police has shown that this relationship between agency and platforms is very complex. On one hand, we have the platform’s interface, community guidelines, and governance strategies. They enable and shape user behavior and create power dynamics that favor certain types of engagement on the platform. For example, Instagram’s algorithmic ranking systems reward botting behavior with visibility. This is one reason why users initially developed automated botting practices, because botting challenges these systems and influences the reach and visibility of an Instagram account. It represents an attempt for users to gain agency on the platform.
[00:38:12] Nathalie: But, at the same time, this is a risky practice since the platform also sanctions automated engagement through, for example, deplatforming. This contradiction in Instagram’s platform governance is comparable to their contradictory moderation of pornographic content. A study by the European nonprofit organization AI Forensics on pornographic ads revealed Meta’s double standards in moderating pornographic visuals. The study found that they are removed when uploaded by a user, but on the other hand, promoted when uploaded as a paid advertisement. These double standards negatively affect human content creators more than they affect porn bots. On the other hand, we have users like the bot police, who actively police and govern botting and other bot-related activities. The case of Instagram bot policing is particularly interesting as it highlights how users can take on limited roles as regulators and moderators of online behavior. But their possibilities through the Instagram interface to do that are very limited, namely, to flagging and reporting content and comments to the platform. The bot police, for instance, prosecute botting activities and porn bots. Their actions can lead to the removal of accounts and also the restriction of user activity. But we have to say that this is not an institutionalized force, nor is there any code of conduct or training. The bot police operate at their own discretion.
[00:39:44] Nathalie: In my article, I also highlight the contradictions and double standards in Meta’s platform governance that arise from its ambiguous concept of authenticity. Authentic behavior is seen as real or genuine, while inauthentic behavior is considered fake and is used to distinguish human run accounts from automated ones. But however, this does not account for the hybrid and entangled nature of human and nonhuman agents in social media environments. Botting is a good example to demonstrate that it is not that easy. It’s a common practice on Instagram to enhance visibility by challenging the platform’s algorithmic ranking through high engagement rate. So as a user, I cannot differentiate whether a like, for instance, was performed because someone really liked or was interested in my content, or if someone just wanted to attract my attention. I also can’t differentiate whether they pushed the heart button themselves or deployed a bot to do that. This example shows that the dichotomies between inauthentic and authentic, fake and real, and human and artificial are neither sustainable nor useful because the engagement on social media platforms inherently crosses these boundaries.
[00:41:00] Nathalie: This study on the bot police and my research on botting demonstrate that human and nonhuman agents are always already entangled in complex ways. So, the concept of authenticity is counteracted by the menial operations of the platform. This highlights the interconnectedness of authenticity and artificiality on social media platforms, and how the platform and users navigate this narrative of authenticity versus artificiality to achieve their own goals. The bot police’s self-understanding as custodians of authenticity on Instagram reflects this reductive categorization of what they perceive as inauthentic and authentic behavior. However, this also highlights the power dynamics at play as the bot police’s actions against presumed botters and porn bots can be viewed as a form of mutual moderation and peer surveillance that reinforces the platform’s governance strategies. The bot police position themselves above other users, risking the trapping of potentially real and authentic engagement, if one will say so. By threatening other users with public denunciation, they shifted the power balance hierarchically downward.
[00:42:15] Nathalie: This highlights another critical aspect of my research: the role of power asymmetries in shaping platform culture and agency. It manifests at different levels. Instagram’s complex content moderation systems, for example, were developed in response to societal and political pressures. In 2016, it integrated independent factchecking to combat the increasing spread of misinformation and disinformation in light of Donald Trump’s first election as US president. After nearly ten years, at the beginning of 2025, Meta announced the end of independent factchecking, despite the ongoing prevalence of fake news, hate speech, and porn bots. The media coverage following this announcement links this decision to an [00:43:00] effort to improve relations with the recently inaugurated President Trump, who’s serving a second term. Power asymmetries and user-led bot policing on Instagram are shaped by the platform’s governance strategies, the hierarchical dynamics among users and communities, and the broader economic and political pressures influencing platform policies.
[00:43:27] Delores: I am actually very much a technophile. I am increasingly fascinated by AI. I am very interested in games and gaming, and yet I inhabit this place of deep skepticism when it comes to some of these power relations that we see between people, platforms, and their creators.
[00:43:50] Elaine: It’s interesting to see how different points of view and different points of view of different people having whether it’s the more negative, or should we say, maybe not negative, but skeptical points of views. I know that right now currently can be difficult to look at the time that we’re in and where social media platforms are at, and even social media platforms—more than social media platforms, platforms in general, digital platforms, platformization—are going through a difficult time with less users actually online than before. But there can be—and maybe I’m more of a utopianist still at heart or a positivist, even as much as I have been burned by so many of the things that I thought, “Ah, the great revolutionary, the great disruptors.” (I’m looking at you, Netflix.) I still hold this hope that there are still places of positivity. There are still places where we can use the very functions of these systems to do good. I think that’s the interesting thing, and I think some of our authors have these really interesting points as well.
[00:44:50] Nina Medvedeva: My name is Nina Medvedeva. I am a postdoctoral fellow of Women and Gender Studies at Hamilton College. I focus on the political object of the home, thinking through how it’s regulated, how that regulation is contested, and how all of us are impacted and shaped by our relationship to the home. My current project, “At Home in the Sharing Economy,” focuses on Airbnb in particular, thinking through how the regulatory fights around Airbnb in Washington DC, Boston, and San Francisco teach us about how platforms reshape the home, as well as how the home might escape the platform’s seemingly totalizing grasp. While it may be tempting to think of platforms as these incredibly powerful infrastructures that can escape government regulations and the best efforts by activists to contest them, what my work shows is that platforms are actually incredibly dependent on the political headwinds they find themselves in. In other words, a platform is only as powerful as the political conditions allow it to be.
[00:46:00] Nina: But I also don’t want to overstate just how fragile platforms are. I think what we find in these contests around platforms is this minefield of different types of agentic choices and intended and unintended effects that those choices then have. In my article, “The Platform-Enabled Durability of Colonial Racial Capitalism in Washington DC’s Wards 7 and 8,” I think through these contradictory effects where people’s choices on platforms might lead to what they want, but they also might lead to rather unexpected consequences as these choices are contextualized within the broader scales of the platform and the larger political economy that the platform is located in and reinforces. So what I mean by this is that a Black resident of Washington DC’s Ward 8, who was an Airbnb host, might think that they’re actually doing a really good thing—that they’re bringing in money into neighborhoods that have been historically disinvested by the DC and federal governments, that they’re fighting for a sense of place in Anacostia that pushes back against longstanding racist depictions of these places—but at the same time, given the location of Airbnb within a specific political economy, and given how Airbnb then uses the words of these hosts to justify its continued stay within cities without being regulated, those very positive things that Black hosts do might wind up actually contributing to gentrification in other parts of the city or enforce processes of extraction that are actually deeply harmful to the ways of life that they hope to protect.
[00:47:50] Nina: And what I think this should do for us as scholars, as feminists, isn’t necessarily produce a level of rage or a level of condemnation, even though that is one response that people have had. Instead, it should really prompt us to think about how the choices that we make, how we try to exercise agency really can sometimes spin out of our control, and how the target of what we see as important feminist activism around housing should extend beyond individual actions to also encompass these broader scales of the city, the platform, and the structural world of racial capitalism that we’re all located in. And doing this work isn’t easy. It means thinking about the histories of a place and how certain platform economies didn’t just drop out of the blue after the 2008 financial crash but are actually due to longstanding historical patterns of racial capitalist dispossession in a given area. It also means paying attention to the really important ethnographic details of people’s lives, thinking about how they conceive of their actions, thinking about the kind of discursive space that they operate in, how their activism responds to certain platform provocations, while also maybe sometimes even playing into it by reinforcing the platform and its ability to continue to do business. And so, it means really carefully paying attention to these multiple types of factors, and this is by no means a project that I think one researcher can take on. I’ve tried to do this across three cities, and it’s really difficult to hold all of this in tandem. So, thinking about this collaboratively, thinking about how we can draw on each other’s work proves to be very important. And even while we might maintain the sort of generosity about our interlocutors and the choices they make as well as how they rebound in unexpected ways within a given political economy, I think it’s important not to lose sight of what Brenna Bhandar, drawing on Cedric Robinson, says here: the kind of constant object in all of this, which is the white supremacy that enables racial capitalist extraction to continue.
[00:50:08] Nina: That is our target. We should never lose sight of it. Even as we attend to these multiple scales, as people make choices on platforms and we analyze their impacts, we should never lose sight that the object that we’re analyzing is always within this sociopolitical economic field that we are trying to understand and hopefully change. I am recording this podcast in probably one of the darkest times that I’ve experienced in my life. Many things around us seem hopeless. Change seems incredibly difficult to attain. But what these platform fights have really taught me, and what thinking about platforms and agency has really helped me to understand, is that we do have the capacity to make change. It might not always look the way that we want it to. It might not always happen at the timescale that we want it to, but you can win fights that you engage in, even if there’s more fights to come. And I hope that this kind of hopeful, positive message is what people draw from the article, even as it looks at an incredibly bleak phenomenon.
[00:51:20] Delores: Do you have any final thoughts to share?
[00:51:22] Elaine: I think there are notes about where we can go in the future with the research. Many of our authors actually expand from here, and I think that’s the place of this edition as well. We have placed ourselves within a certain place of time and space, and I think it’s fair to ask, well, where does the research go from here now? And some of our authors have really approached that question, not just for cultural studies, but for platform studies, for internet studies, for anybody studies, in terms of where do we go from here? What could be next?
[00:51:54] Kelsey: Hi, my name is Kelsey Cummings. I’m an assistant professor in communication studies at Christopher Newport University, and my research focuses on new media and identity and various different intersections of political power struggles, as well as culture. So my paper [“‘Help Them Keep Doing What They’re Doing’: Intersections of Agency, Affect, and Capital in the Twitch Subscription System”] looks at Twitch and is specifically interested in various different types of monetary transactions that happen on Twitch, specifically because my research is very focused in affect and the histories of affect as discussed by folks like [Lauren] Berlant and [Sara] Ahmed. What I’m looking at here is essentially how emotional investment is translated into capital. So, with Twitch, part of what interests me is the various different ways that capital exchanges happen. You have traditional subscriptions where a person will pay, say, five dollars or so per month to a particular channel in exchange for which they usually have custom emojis that they can use, as well as shout-outs, which they get oftentimes from the channel person in question.
[00:53:09] Kelsey: What this is essentially is a means by which Twitch as a platform tends to occlude as much as possible the capital nature of the platform, and this is very characteristic of social media broadly speaking and internet spaces writ large in the contemporary moment. This is why I think it’s useful to look at Twitch as a particular example because it is somewhat different from, for example, YouTube. YouTube has its own monetary policies, right? Something like Patreon also has its own separate sort of ways to frame the purchasing of subscriptions as being an emotional investment in a person or a form of supporting particular types of content. In the case of Twitch, because of its live nature, it instead shares a lot of different ways of sort of hiding what the nature of the capital exchange is. For example, what the person on the user side sees is they see I’m donating X amount of money to this streamer who I feel really emotionally connected to. What they’re not seeing is the percentage of that that goes directly to Twitch. And so given that, I’m really interested in thinking about intersections of these concepts of capital and affect in relation to agency and autonomy. Users are encouraged to perceive it as an interpersonal action rather than a purchase. Because of that, there’s various different broader implications that we can think of. I’m specifically interested in how moving forward, new media platforms will continue to try to make less clear the nature of capital exchanges, and to instead make those capital exchanges perceived as having more to do with emotional investment.
[00:55:04] Kelsey: What I hope this article does is, a) give us a sense of how these shifts are occurring and are continuing to occur. For example, on a platform like TikTok with live feature, the use of various different euphemisms to hide the exchange of money happens, for example, through things like flower crowns. You can buy a roaring lion, and the lion roaring is a literal just visual manifestation of that you just donated money to this streamer. In that way, right, we have this very clear coalescence of the hiding of the fact that money is being exchanged, and also the sense of literally reaching through the screen to touch the person that the viewer is assumed to be emotionally invested in. So, for example, they can put heart glasses on them, or they can make various other different types of animations emerge around their faces. So, what you have here is a broad overlap that I think will very much continue to characterize the new media landscape moving forward. I’m also pointing out in this article to contribute to broader understandings of the overlap between these theoretical concepts of affect and capital exchange in the digital context specifically, and how this diverges and also continues preexisting trends.
[00:56:33] Kelsey: Finally, I note in my conclusion that I think that future research should start to look more closely at the intersections of different types of capital exchange. So, for example, something that stood out to me quite a bit doing the research for this article was what I perceive as kind of the potential overlap between something like digital sex work and Twitch as a platform. There are expectations around the streamer’s body and embodied experience that are oftentimes explicitly sexual, but even when they aren’t explicitly sexual, they still have to do with this embodied exchange that’s happening. Similarly, I think something like digital mutual aid often comes up here as well and is something that I hope future research will continue to look into.
[00:57:20] Delores: As someone who is admittedly quite skeptical of some of the notions of platforms, power, and agency, I’m incredibly excited to read this edition. I think it’s going to be a vital contributor to the fields of both platform studies and cultural studies. And so, I am eager to get it into my hands. Very eager. So, thank you both very much for the work that you’ve done to pull it together.
[00:57:48] Reed: No, thank you very much. If you’re interested in opportunities like this, I have to plug, as co-chair, the New Media and Digital Cultures Working Group of the Cultural Studies Association. We meet once or twice every single semester, obviously a little bit more as the conference comes together, and we do a whole lot more than just prepare for the conference. We share good news with each other. We share publication opportunities and job calls with each other. We’re a tight-knit group of people, so we understand each other’s interests, and just in general, it’s a great group to get on with if you have any interest in new media and digital cultures. And if you don’t have any interest in new media and digital cultures, any of the other working groups of the Cultural Studies Association are phenomenal intellectual communities, and so you should really reach out to their respective leadership and get involved.
[00:58:36] Delores: Thank you again, Reed and Elaine, for joining us today and talking about the special edition. Be sure to check out the Lateral website at https://csalateral.org, not only for this special edition, but for all previous editions, including the regular fall and spring publications. We’d also like to thank the entire Positions editorial and production team, along with our coproducers Mark Nunes and Elaine Venter, whose work makes these episodes possible. And we thank you, our audience, for your time and attention today. If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to our podcast and join us for the next episode of Positions, where we will continue to engage with essential and pertinent topics in cultural studies.
Credits
Produced by Mark Nunes and Elaine Venter
Season Two
Hosted by Delores B. Phillips
Production by: Sully Styles, Lead Audio Engineer; Elaine Venter; and Mark Nunes
Editorial by Mark Nunes, Theodora Danylevich, Anthony Grajeda, Howard Hastings, Reed Van Schenck, Kathalene Razzano, Jennifer Scuro, and Elaine Venter
Music by Matt Nunes
Notes
- Yi-Ling Liu, “The Shared Feeling of Being Harvested by the Future,” The New York Times, May 12, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/opinion/us-china-ai-future.html. ↩
- U.S. Census Bureau, “Computer and Internet Use in the United States: 1984 to 2009,” February 2010, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/computer-internet/computer-use-1984-2009.html. ↩
- Pew Research Center, “Mobile Fact Sheet,” November 2025, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile. ↩
- International Telecommunication Union (ITU), “Internet Users per 100 Inhabitants 1997 to 2007,” ICT Data and Statistics (IDS), archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20150517033104/http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/ict. ↩
- GSMA, “Global Smartphone Penetration Rate as Share of Population from 2016 to 2024,” Statista, February 28, 2025, https://www.statista.com/statistics/203734/global-smartphone-penetration-per-capita-since-2005. ↩
- This figure varies by age, with Gen Z and Millennials reporting over six hours, Gen X around five, Boomers over three, and the Silent Generation just over one hour. See Chandra Steele, “Yikes! The Average American Spent 2.5 Months on Their Phone in 2024,” PC Magazine, December 27, 2024, https://www.pcmag.com/articles/yikes-the-average-american-spent-25-months-on-their-phone-in-2024. ↩
- Dead internet theory—the view that all (or most) content/interactions on the internet come from bots rather than humans—is gaining some traction, given the presence of content generated by AI, algorithmic filtering, and declining literacy. See Hal Berghel, “Generative AI is Breathing New Life Into the Dead Internet Theory,” Computer 59, no. 1 (2026): 132–39, https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2025.3616665. ↩
- See Larry Diamond, “Liberation Technology,” Journal of Democracy 21, no. 3 (2010): 69–83, https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.0.0190. ↩
- See Laura Portwood-Stacer, “How We Talk About Media Refusal, Part 1: ‘Addiction,’” Flow, July 29, 2012, https://www.flowjournal.org/2012/07/how-we-talk-about-media-refusal-part-1. ↩
- I take internet studies to be broadly related to and a foundational pillar of some areas of platform studies, just as apps are built upon the internet, among other technologies. A comparison of historical trends in several key terms in these fields is illuminating: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=internet%2Csocial+media%2Ccomputer%2Cplatform%2Conline%2Cmobile%2CAI%2Cmedia%2Cdigital%2Ctechnology&year_start=1940&year_end=2022&case_insensitive=true&corpus=en&smoothing=3. ↩
- By contrast, recent historical scholarship about the early internet has not taken this approach. For example, see Avery Dame-Griff, The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet, NYU Press, 2023. ↩
- Peter Steiner, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” (cartoon), The New Yorker, July 5, 1993. ↩
- Christine Hine, Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied, and Everyday, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, 36. See also Christine Hine, Virtual Ethnography, Sage, 2000. ↩
- Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, University of Minnesota Press, 2007. ↩
- Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, NYU Press, 2018. ↩
- Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Polity, 2019. ↩
- Joy Buolamwini, Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines, Random House, 2023. ↩
- Meredith Broussard, More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech, MIT Press, 2023. ↩
- Sasha Costanza-Chock, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, MIT Press, 2020. ↩
- Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Routledge, 2002. ↩
- Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 234. ↩
- Cecilia Kang, Ryan Mac, and Eli Tan, “Meta and YouTube Found Negligent in Landmark Social Media Addiction Case,” The New York Times, March 26, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/technology/social-media-trial-verdict.html. ↩
- See, for example, Qiuqing Tai, “China’s Media Censorship: A Dynamic and Diversified Regime,” Journal of East Asian Studies 14, no. 2 (2014): 185–209, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26335242. ↩
- Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, Yale University Press, 2019. ↩
- Karen Hao, Heidi Swart, Andrea Paola Hernández, and Nadine Freischlad, “AI Colonialism” (series), MIT Technology Review, April 2022, https://www.technologyreview.com/supertopic/ai-colonialism-supertopic. ↩
- Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, Yale University Press, 2021. ↩
- See Md Abu Bakar Siddik, Arman Shehabi, and Landon Marston, “The Environmental Footprint of Data Centers in the United States,” Environmental Research Letters 16, no. 6 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/abfba1. ↩
