Platform Values

Social media platforms have simultaneously been credited with bringing the world closer together and strengthening divisions, championing authentic self-expression and incentivizing fake interactions, mobilizing political engagement and reducing politics to empty posturing. These competing visions share the same premise: whatever else they may be, platforms are not neutral. Joining the vibrant public and academic conversation on the partisanship of platforms, my research approaches social media as prominent sites where values are expressed, contested, and diffused.

In “Beyond Neutrality: Conceptualizing Platform Values,” Rebecca Scharlach, Limor Shifman and I present a conceptual framework for studying the communication of values on and through social media composed of two dimensions: scale (from individual users to global infrastructures) and explicitness (from the most explicit to the invisible). This integrative approach to platform values — bringing together person values, cultural values, and the values built into material systems — offers a way to bridge existing areas of research like platform governance and online communities, and expresses the main idea connecting the different strands of my research. To date, I have approached the study of platform values through the analysis of 1) infrastructure, 2) user-generated content, and 3) public controversies.

Infrastructure

Over the past decade, commercial social media platforms have scaled up, in terms of the number of users, and scaled out, in terms of integration into public life. Questions a close friend might ask such as “how are you feeling” or “what do you think about this” have been incorporated into the very infrastructure of these platforms. We are invited to review products purchased and services received, to rate the latest television show or blockbuster movie, and to Like posts on social media with the click of a button or the tap of a screen. My analysis of infrastructure investigates both how such systems measure and act upon notions of value and how people navigate metrics and algorithmic governance in return. Within this domain, I’ve looked at the development of the Netflix recommendation engine through an open-source competition with Ted Striphas (“Recommended for You: The Netflix Prize and the Production of Algorithmic Culture”), how artists on Instagram use and experience the Like button as a technology of evaluation with Jed Brubaker (“Living with Everyday Evaluations on Social Media Platforms”), and how movie theaters employ loyalty programs and related strategies to emulate the organizational logics of platforms with CJ Reynolds (“New Media Goes to the Movies: Digitizing the Theatrical Audience”). Together with James N. Gilmore, I have also edited a special issue on infrastructural politics in the journal of Cultural Studies. In the introduction to the special issue, we theorize infrastructure as a technique of governance and identify scale, formalization, and the imaginary as important concepts for political analysis and intervention (“Infrastructural Politics Amidst the Coils of Control”). My individual paper in the issue takes Facebook as a case study and adapts sociologist Norbert Elias’ conceptualization of the civilizing process to interrogate how social media platforms establish socially sanctioned categories of people and modes of conduct (“Civilizing Infrastructure”).

User-Generated Content

If infrastructure acts as the metaphorical pipes of a platform, content is what flows through them. And this flow has reached unprecedented levels. People around the world upload over 720,000 hours of video to YouTube, post 95 million photos and videos to Instagram, and send 500 million Tweets each day. Each message posted to social media is a little assertion of value — a claim that “this matters” or “this is important to me” or “you should care about this.” In order to make sense of and identify patterns within this morass of social media content, my work adopts genre as an analytic. Genres, while hard to pin down, play a pivotal role in the production and consumption of digital culture, and accordingly, the social construction of values. Within this domain, the DigitalValues team and I have looked at how people from different parts of the world imagine social media content using an open-ended survey to determine what types of content they identify and how they feel about it (“Mapping the Transnational Imaginary of Social Media Genres”). We propose the notion of “genre imaginaries” to refer to shared ideas about what is and what should be on social media that reveal underlying beliefs about morality and the purpose of platforms. In a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Communication, we turn from value-laden perceptions about social media content to how content itself depicts values, examining the images associated with value hashtags like #freedom on Instagram (“What Does #Freedom Look Like? Instagram and the Visual Imagination of Values”). My ongoing research extends the analysis of the values expressed through social media content focusing on genre case studies that include New Year’s resolutions on Twitter, product review videos on YouTube, and YouTube videos that audit the recommendation and moderation algorithms of the platform as part of a strategy of what CJ Reynolds and I call “user-generated accountability.”

Public Controversies

Infrastructural values, or the values built into material systems and organizations, need not align with the values of the people using such systems… and often do not. The tension between the two parties is at the heart of the many controversies surrounding social media platforms. As such, controversies provide ideal sites to study platform values, norms, and expectations that often remain hidden — or at least implicit. A co-authored paper with CJ Reynolds examines the protests in response to Yahoo!’s 1999 purchase of GeoCities, showing how access is always bound up in a struggle for control and that users have long been vital agents of platform politics (“The Haunting of GeoCities and the Politics of Access Control on the Early Web”). Moving to more recent controversies, Casey Fiesler and I look at the comments on news articles about the merger of Facebook and WhatsApp, as well as the business model of the email service unroll.me, to reveal pervasive privacy attitudes and make suggestions for platform communication and design strategies (“We are the Product’: Public Reactions to Online Data Sharing and Privacy Controversies in the Media”). Joined by Jed Brubaker, the three of us employ a similar methodology to explore different understandings of platforms and platform-based research surrounding the Facebook emotional contagion controversy (“Unexpected Expectations: Public Reaction to the Facebook Emotional Contagion Study”).