The course presents key readings in media & communications and sciences & technology studies to analyse contemporary instances of digital media platforms.
It will demonstrate how GAFAM companies become dominant actors in these four infrastructure sectors by using the platform strategy that granted them their initial success, and by adapting it from the web economy to infrastructure management. This course will study this radical extension of platform power on the internet architecture, uses, and governance. While GAFAM companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) are still studied as digital platforms, they now constitute major operators of the internet infrastructure, as witnessed by their involvement since 2010 in four sectors: data centers, undersea cables, telecommunications networks, and satellites. As these trends persist, it may be necessary to find new approaches to vocabulary and knowledge building. This paper argues that media and reading trends in recent decades indicate broader social and cultural changes in which long-form deep reading traditionally associated with the printed book will be marginalised by prevailing media trends and the reading modes they inspire. For example, comprehension suffers when complex texts are read from screens. Empirical research on reading indicates that the reading substrate plays an important role in reading processes. This was accompanied by new media-adequate reading modes: while long-form content invokes immersed and/or deep reading, we predominantly skim online social media. As media statistics suggest, the last five decades have seen two shifts: from textual to visual media, and with the advent of digital screens also from long-form to short-form texts. This paper analyses major social shifts in reading by comparing publishing statistics with results of empirical research on reading. Throughout the 2016 US Presidential election year, the archetypal meme frog has experienced a further bout of popularity after being adopted as a humor device by Donald Trump supporters, identified by the Hillary Clinton campaign as white supremacist iconography, and condemned by the Anti-Defamation League as an “anti-semitic symbol” - all the while being continually repurposed as the protagonist of increasingly complex and self-referential genres of Internet memes including “Rare Pepes,” “Cult of Kek,” and “Beta Uprising.” Repeatedly interviewed about the political reappropriations that turned his iconic character into a “culturally thick object,” Matt Furie has minimized this phenomenon as “just a product of the internet.” And yet, years before its spells of mainstream popularity and its contested political interpretations, Pepe had already found its way to Chinese social media platforms with surprising outcomes. We conclude by inquiring whether this emerging techno-nationalist model could be a plausible platform regulation in the future.ĭespite the global reach of its iconicity, the history of Pepe - from its origins in independent comics to its moment of mainstream limelight on the social media accounts of celebrities like Nicky Minaj or Katy Perry - has for the most part been narrated as a thoroughly American story.
Finally, we analyze the specific role of the WeChat Pay service in establishing a new monetary transaction standard. Drawing on the results of the analysis of technical documentation, business reports, as well as observations and interviews, we first present WeChat as both a platform and an infrastructure, and then we contextualize WeChat in the history of ICT infrastructure and the development of the internet in China. Moreover, our findings show that the infrastructuralization of the WeChat platform model in China is shaped by markedly techno-nationalist media regulations and an increasingly overt cyber-sovereignty agenda. Through the case study of the Chinese social media application, WeChat, we argue that WeChat is an example of a non-Western digital media service that owes its success first to its platformization and then to the infrastructuralization of its platform model. Google and Facebook) are typically described as digital platforms, yet these actors increasingly rely on infrastructural properties to expand and maintain their market power. In the current research on media and communication, Western internet companies (e.g.
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