10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17515
application/pdf
2038-3460
17515
2
en
Paolo Magaudda
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
STS
Infrastructures and Platforms in Media and Cultural Industries
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
12
Conference Reflections
2022-03-26
2023-06-28
2022-03-26
2023-10-23
89-97
TS
Paolo Magaudda
2021
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17515
89
University of Padova
2038-3460
2
STS
en
97
Infrastructures and Platforms in Media and Cultural Industries
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17515/16359
12
                                                              Conference Reflections
                                                                                       89




Infrastructures and Platforms in Media
and Cultural Industries
           Tiziano Bonini                                   Paolo Magaudda
               University of Siena                            University of Padova



      Abstract: This article offers an overview of the topics explored during a
      conference track, titled Platforms and Infrastructures in Media and Cultural
      Industries, organised by the authors within the VIII STS Italia Conference
      held virtually in June 2021. The text starts outlining how infrastructural
      research, which emerged in science and technology studies (STS) and has
      been then adopted in different branches of media studies, evolved. To this
      end, it reviews some of the major works that embraced the so-called ‘in-
      frastructural turn’ in media studies. The emergence of platform studies is
      then outlined, a field that stemmed from game studies and, largely owing
      to the social relevance of social network platforms, subsequently became
      a major intersectional space between STS and media studies.

      Keywords: Infrastructures; platforms; digital media; cultural industries;
      STS.

      Submitted: November 10, 2021 – Accepted: January 12, 2022

      Corresponding author: Tiziano Bonini, Department of Social, Political,
      and Cognitive Sciences, Via Roma 56, 53100, Siena, Italy. Email: tiziano.
      bonini@unisi.it




1. Introduction
    On the occasion of the VIII STS Italia conference, we decided to or-
ganise a track devoted to exploring the current research on platforms and
infrastructures in media and cultural industries. In recent years, it is quite
evident that the major changes in cultural industries and content distribu-
tion have been shaped according to the affordances and constrains offered
by media platforms and digital infrastructures. Media and cultural industry
studies, by borrowing a sensitivity from STS, addressed platforms and in-
frastructures by highlighting that they are not only neutral carriers or facil-
itators but also distinctive sociotechnical entities able to, among other

 TECNOSCIENZA
 Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
 12 (2) pp. 89-97 - ISSN 2038-3460
 www.tecnoscienza.net                                2021
90                                                          Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
things, create new relationships, produce inequalities, modify professional
jobs and consumer practices and even reshape the aesthetics of cultural
content.
     The reasons for organising such a track were therefore quite clear: on
the one hand, in the last couple of years, an STS-rooted perspective on
infrastructures has filtered in media studies to address the growing rele-
vance of the technical dimension in shaping media practices and ecologies
(i.e. Parks and Starosielski 2015; Peters 2015); on the other hand, the rising
relevance of those entities defined as platforms in different societal realms,
including the distribution of media content, witnessed a renewed interac-
tion between STS and media and cultural industry studies (van Dick et al.
2018; Gillespie 2018). We thus arrived at the idea of using the conference
track to map the emerging research focused on this intersection.
     In this emerging literature at the crossroad between STS and media
studies, a specific emphasis has been placed on the mutual interactions be-
tween platforms and their infrastructural qualities, especially by consider-
ing the convergence between internet-based infrastructural services and
the emerging role of different platforms in media and communication. The
ongoing process of ‘platformisation’ is thus outlined as a crucial structural
shift in how value, meanings and practices are created in cultural industries
today (Plantin et al. 2018; Nieborg and Poell 2018; Plantin and
Punathambekar, 2019).
     The next two sections summarise how “infrastructures” and “plat-
forms” have recently emerged as the two ground-breaking keywords in
both STS and media and communication studies.


2. Infrastructures from STS to Media and Cultural
Industries

    Since the middle of the last decade, media studies have been developing
a new perspective centred on media’s infrastructural dimension, an ap-
proach rooted mostly, even if not exclusively, in the research on infor-
mation infrastructures that emerged in the ‘90s in STS. Since several schol-
ars have highlighted media’s infrastructural dimension, this conceptual
shift that occurred at large in media and internet studies has been described
as an ‘infrastructural turn’ (see Balbi et al. 2016; Musiani et al. 2016;
Hesmondhalgh 2021).
    Adopting the notion of infrastructure has been important in media
studies to bring to the foreground several relevant characteristics of digital
communication: from the growing relevance of networks in content distri-
bution (Lobato 2019) to the shift from the focus on individual devices such
as television to interconnected technologies such as digital standards
(Sterne 2012) and smartphones (Magaudda and Piccioni 2019); from the
relevance of invisible and taken-for-granted structures that make commu-
nication possible such as undersee cables (Starosielski 2015) to the growing
Bonini and Magaudda                                                         91
relevance of being constantly connected to our increasingly mediatised so-
cial organisation (Couldry and Hepp 2017).
    The roots of the notion of infrastructure, as is well-known among STS
scholars, lies solidly in STS and, more specifically, in the work of Susan
Leigh Star and Geffrey Bowker (Star and Ruhleder 1996; Bowker and Star
1999). According to a seminal article by Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhle-
der (1996), infrastructures are important because they emerge at the inter-
section between technical elements and social phenomena. Their social rel-
evance derives from the fact that they need to be adopted and made their
own by users so that their role can be easily taken for granted in social
routines. In short, from an STS perspective, focusing on infrastructures
does not mean only considering the technical dimension – it also means
considering how the technical details of technologies intersect with and are
mutually influenced by individuals’ technological uses and practices.
    In recent years, the focus on infrastructures opened in STS has directly
influenced various scholars in media and communication studies, where an
infrastructural perspective has been adopted as a useful point of departure
to make sense of the complex interaction between media’s material nature,
dematerialised digital contents and collective media practices. For exam-
ple, media theorist John Durham Peters proposed an infrastructuralist ap-
proach as a way of understanding the work of media as fundamentally lo-
gistical in the sense that “the job of logistical media is to organise and ori-
ent, to arrange people and property, often into grids” (Peters 2015, 37).
Indeed, as Lisa Parks also noted, “since infrastructures cannot be captured
in a single frame, we must read media with an infrastructural disposition
— that is, when viewing/consuming media we must think not only about
what they represent and how they relate to a history of style, genre, or
meanings, but also think more elementally about what they are made of
and how they arrived” (Parks 2015, 357).
    Joshua Braun outlined the intersection between distribution processes
and media infrastructures in relation to the television sector. In his research
on the MSNBC TV channel, he argued that an infrastructural approach to
media research involves “a sort of archaeological interest in the various
kinks, epicycles, and roundabouts found in a distribution route” that can
expose the “sociotechnical systems at work and lay bare the influence of
infrastructure” (Braun 2015, 9). Similarly, in his research on Netflix, one
of the most relevant contemporary audio-visual platforms, Ramon Lobato
foregrounded the relevance of the infrastructural turn in media studies by
outlining that “what is exciting about this turn to infrastructure in critical
humanities and social science is that it invites engagement with topics that
were previously out of bounds, or at least inaccessible, for many humanists
— issues related to electrical engineering or information systems design”
(Lobato 2019, 78).
    A different level of analysis is represented by the material implications
of media technologies and the way digital media are used concretely in sit-
uated contexts is considered, especially in relation with space and the city.
92                                                             Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
An early example of this perspective is offered by the pioneering work of
anthropologist Brian Larkin (2008) in his ethnographic study on the mu-
tual interactions between communication infrastructures and the culture
of North Nigerian urban contexts. Looking more closely to the relationship
between media infrastructures and the city, media anthropologist Shannon
Mattern (2017, XXV) outlined that the notion of infrastructure “enables
us to appreciate media as potentially embodied on an urban or even global
scale, as a force whose modes, ideologies, and aesthetics of operation can
be spatialized, and materialized, in the landscape”. Maren Hartmann
(2017) adopted the notion of infrastructure by considering the role of elec-
tricity in relation to smartphone use: electricity, undoubtedly, is a funda-
mental infrastructural dimension that shapes smartphone practices, even
though the infrastructural qualities of these devices go well beyond this
dimension and include a wider set of stratified infrastructural levels over-
lapping each other. Along the same line of enquiry, Magaudda and Piccioni
(2019) outlined the multiple infrastructural levels that characterise
smartphone-based situated practices in everyday life and empirically
showed how intimate relationships with smartphones are nested into a
stratified arrangement of overlapping and intersecting infrastructures.
     The study of media infrastructures thus did bring several productive
inputs to media studies; however, the quick and rapid embracing of an in-
frastructural turn has also produced several critical issues. Media scholar
David Hesmondhalgh (2021) summarised these issues, noting that the no-
tion of infrastructure has rapidly become a fashionable buzzword, often
losing its analytical power, especially in interpretations characterised by an
ambiguous understanding of the role of materiality in studying infrastruc-
tures and by a tendency towards banality and vagueness. Moreover,
Hesmondhalgh added, emphasising STS’s roots in studying infrastructures
is also the basis for a lack of recognition of an original intellectual trajectory
already present in media history and media’s political economy, a trajectory
related to the long-term developments and political implication of commu-
nication infrastructures, a space of research pioneered, among others, by
Armand Mattelart (2000).


3. Platform Studies at the Intersection between STS and
Media Studies

    In the last fifteen years, STS and media studies scholars have also met
each other on another emerging field of research with a new research ob-
ject: digital platforms. The field, according to Bogost and Montfort (2007),
is called platform studies, where we find not only STS and media studies
scholars but also anthropologists, cultural studies scholars, critical political
economists of media and communication, and software scholars. Media
studies primarily borrowed the concept of ‘platform’ from game design
Bonini and Magaudda                                                          93
(Bogost and Montfort 2009) and extended it to content-sharing websites
(Gillespie 2010; Helmond 2015) and social media applications (Langlois
and Elmer 2013). The key features platform studies discuss include pro-
grammability, affordances, networks of heterogeneous actors, platforms as
socio-technical assemblages, platform power and user agency.
     Among the earliest media and communication scholars who addressed
the material aspects of digital platforms from a social constructivist per-
spective is Tarleton Gillespie: after deconstructing the ‘discursive position-
ing’ of platforms as neutral intermediaries, Gillespie showed in his founda-
tional article on the politics of platforms that it is, in fact, the activity of
content moderation that defines digital platforms (Gillespie 2010). Gilles-
pie et al. (2014) are also among the first to identify the cross-pollination
process between media scholars and STS scholars in platform studies. Gil-
lespie’s research on platforms stands precisely at the intersection of STS
and media studies and has opened the dialogue to scholars from these two
disciplines. In the meantime, the increasing prevalence of digital platforms
in all spheres of society (van Dijck et al. 2018) has also drawn the attention
of other disciplines, such as the critical political economy of communica-
tion. These strands of research are important because they help foreground
the social and political consequences of the rapid ‘platformisation’ of social
life (Van Dijck et al. 2018). Langlois and Elmer (2013), for example, criti-
cally assessed “some of the new forms of power produced by corporate
social media platforms” such as Facebook (p. 14). Economic interests, they
argued, influence the design of social media interfaces.
     In addition to political economy, cultural studies also intervened in the
conversation, bringing attention back to the agency of the users of these
platforms. But it was with the work of Jean Christophe Plantin that these
debates converged towards a single centre: Plantin et al. (2018) are among
the first to connect the growing strands of research on infrastructures and
platforms, arguing that digital technologies have made possible a platformi-
zation of infrastructures and an infrastructuralization of platforms, highlight-
ing the tensions that arise when the infrastructures most essential to our
daily lives are dominated by the private technological entities represented
by platforms.
     The conceptualisation of these two processes – platformisation of infra-
structures and infrastructurisation of platforms – represents the ripe fruit
of several years of mutual breeding between STS, media studies, anthro-
pology, cultural studies and critical political economy of media. It is im-
portant to clarify what Plantin et al. (2018) mean by these two processes.
The platformisation of infrastructures refers to a process whereby the tra-
ditional infrastructures tend to be privatised and fragmented: a typical ex-
ample being the World Wide Web, which started as an open infrastruc-
ture, conceived as a public good created by public investment, which then
gradually became more and more fragmented into closed ecosystems where
the users are ‘locked-in’: a few global apps such as Twitter, Instagram, Tik
Tok, Spotify or Netflix capture the majority of internet consumption. Users
94                                                          Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
of these platforms no longer surf the web, but jump from one private plat-
form to another, while their online actions are subject to the dynamics typ-
ical of web platformisation (datafication, commodification and selection,
according to van Dijck et al. 2018). On the contrary, the infrastructuralisa-
tion of platforms indicates the endemic growth of the power of some plat-
forms that start functioning as infrastructures. Other authors, such as van
Dijck et al. (2018), have also highlighted this process, noting that Facebook
and Google have acquired the scale of real infrastructures (“platform-in-
frastructures”) and become semi-monopolistic actors, like what happened
with the infrastructures of the past, such as railway networks, electricity
grids and so on.
    Like the global and transnational companies that monopolize the oil
and pipeline markets, big tech is monopolizing the process of extracting
data from users (see Zuboff 2019; Couldry and Mejias 2019). Although
there are many similarities with the past, we must also emphasize the dif-
ferences in terms of “range” between media platforms and transportation
and electric networks of the past: the former monopolies act today at global
level, the latter are often limited to national contexts.
    Facebook, according to Plantin and Punathambekar (2019), is a strik-
ing example. Though it began its evolution as a platform (Helmond 2015),
the now massive scale of Facebook usage and its semi-monopolistic posi-
tion in social networking services have led the company to enter more
deeply into a variety of infrastructural domains. In 2016, as highlighted by
critical political economy scholar Dwine Winseck (2017), Facebook built
a massive undersea cable in partnership with Microsoft, connecting the
United States to Spain, in line with the current trend of internet companies
entering the cable industry.


4. Conclusion

    As we have seen along this article, the infrastructural dimension of web
platforms has become a crucial focus for today’s social sciences, which have
been increasingly borrowing the concepts and perspectives formed at the
intersection between STS and media studies. What we hope is that this
overview on the converging trajectories that have characterised, on the one
hand, the STS-rooted study of infrastructure and, on the other hand, the
analysis of digital platforms, represents a common ground on which devel-
oping new research on multiple domains and topics: from the evolution of
online communication to economic processes, from cultural production
and consumption to raising political concerns related to the increasing role
of platforms in our contemporary society.
Bonini and Magaudda                                                             95
Acknowledgements

    We are grateful to Massimo Airoldi (EM Lyon, France), Philippe Bouquillion
and Christine Ithurbide (Paris 13 University, France), Elisa Oreglia (King's Col-
lege, London, UK) Davide Carpano (UC San Diego, USA), Gaia Casagrande (Sa-
pienza University of Rome), Martin Formasi (Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lu-
gano), Elisabetta Locatelli (Catholic University, Milan), Alberto Novello (Padua
Conservatory) and Sofia Torre (University of Aquila, Italy) for having joined our
conference track, bringing their great contribution and valuable inputs.



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