Platformed Bodies

In “Th e politics of platforms”, Tarleton Gillespie (2010) identifi es how social media com-panies, during the 2000s, pivoted toward marketing their products as “platforms”. He pinpointed what has now become common knowledge: that platformisation presents unique opportunities for businesses to create, control, and profi t from markets, while simultaneously, in their consumer-facing communication, off ering unique experiences of data-driven social connection with seemingly egalitarian and democratic infrastructures. Th e technological, social, and theoretical developments in the years since Gillespie’s semi-nal piece have only made his analysis more relevant.Th e popularisation of the platform perspective has joined, and to some degree displaced, other frameworks used to make sense of contemporary “network society” (Castells, 2010): frameworks like media infrastructure, ecology, logics, and industry (Fuchs, 2021). Conceptually, a substantial lack of clarity (or openness, depending on the generosity of the reading) remains. Platform analysis is typically taken to question “the coevolution of social media platforms and sociality in the context of a rising culture of connectivity” (van Dijck, 2013, p. 28). Inspired by Actor Network Th eory (ANT) and politi-cal economy, van Dijck argues that to understand “platform society”, we must identify both the techno-cultural and socioeconomic aspects of its operation and, crucially, have our analyses be informed by both. Th is analytical ethos and method has proven useful both for disassembling individual platforms as well as tracing sociality across platforms. With the abundance of social media, apps, devices, screens, sensors, virtual reality, and augmented reality – driven by a few extremely powerful and wealthy tech companies – most spheres of life are intimately entangled with platforms’ transnational and neoliberal organisation of sociability and commerce (Srnicek, 2017). Consequently, platformisation seems to be an ever-expanding mode of social organisation. In other words, platformisa-tion has changed sensorial access to, and the conditions for, sociality and embodying identities. Crucially, what platform analysis reveals is how popular narratives of connec-tion, sociality, and productivity do discursive work to obfuscate the inherent tensions and oppositions between the (increasing) disparity of value between owners and users. Argu-ably, studying embodiment, identities, and aff ect is crucial for understanding sociality and power in platform society. Th us, this special issue interrogates the conditions that allow contemporary platformed bodies to emerge, feel, act, and organise.