Los Angeles, February 4-5, 2023
(Writing Sprint, February 6-7, 2023)
Over the last decade, there has been growing concern over the influence of platforms on multiple spheres of life. Definitions of “platforms” are various and controversial. As defined by van Dijck, platforms are, “providers of software, (sometimes) hardware, and services that help code social activities into a computational architecture; they process (meta)data through algorithms and formatted protocols before presenting their interpreted logic in the form of user-friendly interfaces with default settings that reflect the platform owner’s strategic choices” (2013, p. 29). As Tarleton Gillespie (2010) notes, the choice of the term “platform” itself is an indication of the role many of these sites hope to project and establish their role in society as a “neutral intermediary.” Yet, major social platforms like Facebook and Twitter have affected (inflected, infected) social discourse, leading to questions of how people use and are used by these platforms (Burgess, 2021). And while social platforms have dominated many of these conversations, interdisciplinary scholars have called attention to the platformization of everything from healthcare to business education (e.g., Ajunwa & Greene, 2019; Berg et al., 2018; Kelkar, 2018; Kellogg, Valentine, & Christin, 2020; Lee et al., 2015; Zhang, 2021). Critical attention to platforms and platformization across domains raises common questions: namely, when we all use the same “Software as a Service” how far does that remove the locus of control from the users and from the institutions and organizations they work within?
We invite you to join us for a two-day unconference and workshop that seeks to bring together researchers from across disciplines who are seeking to understand the role of platforms, broadly construed, in society and within institutions, the threats and opportunities they pose, and how effective policies might be crafted to address them.
An optional writing sprint will follow the unconference, with the intention of producing substantial collaborative and individual works, to be published in a collected volume.
We ask participants interested in attending the workshop to submit a 500 to 1000 word position paper, no later than December 1, 2022, to unplatforming@gmail.com. The position papers may include any of the following:
- Explorations of how we should be defining and conceptualizing platforms themselves. What is included in these definitions, and what might be missed?
- A potential empirical study of a specific platform.
- An analysis of the conceptual traditions and methodologies that may be of most benefit to researchers interested in studying platform mediation.
- Structures of ownership and control for platforms.
- Theoretical perspectives that advance our understanding of the relationship between platforms and users.
- Design implication or policy position papers that address the role platforms are playing in society.
- Critical examination of the field of platform studies itself.
We are seeking unformed, unpolished work that is at a stage that can be influenced by the discussions that will occur at the meeting. Additionally, this work can take many forms: research ideas or drafts, speculative fiction, and other forms of creative work.
We have invited several people to help to encourage our conversations and think about possibilities:
- Roderic N. Crooks, UC Irvine
- Paul Dourish, UC Irvine
- Lilly Irani, UC San Diego
- Michael Yudell, Arizona State University
Organizing Committee:
- Alexander Halavais
- Kathleen (Katie) Pine
- Nicholas Proferes
- Shawn Walker
Works Cited
Ajunwa, I., & Greene, D. (2019). Platforms at work: Automated hiring platforms and other new intermediaries in the organization of work. In Work and labor in the digital age. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Berg, J., Furrer, M., Harmon, E., Rani, U., & Silberman, M. S. (2018). Digital labour platforms and the future of work. Towards Decent Work in the Online World. Rapport de l’OIT.
Burgess, J. (2021). Platform studies. In S. Cunningham & D. Craig (Eds.), Creator culture: An introduction to global social media entertainment (pp. 21-38). NYU Press.
Gillespie, T. (2010). The politics of “platforms.” New media & society, 12(3), 347-364.
Kelkar, S. (2018). Engineering a platform: The construction of interfaces, users, organizational roles, and the division of labor. New Media & Society, 20(7), 2629-2646.
Kellogg, K.C., Valentine, M.A., & Christin, A. (2020). Algorithms at work: The new contested terrain of control.” Academy of Management Annals, 14(1), 366-410.
Lee, M. K., Kusbit, D., Metsky, E., & Dabbish, L. (2015, April). Working with machines: The impact of algorithmic and data-driven management on human workers. In Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1603-1612).
Van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford University Press.
Zhang, L. (2021). Platformizing family production: The contradictions of rural digital labor in China. The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 32(3), 341-359.
