What Even Is a Platform?

Wayfinding: Spotlights > Platforms > What Even Is a Platform?

The term platform is widley (mis-)used to describe a range of consumer-level internet access points, from social media apps to websites. In Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future, Ben Tarnoff writes:

None of the metaphors we use to think about the internet are perfect, but ‘platform’ is among the worst. The term originally had a specific technical meaning: it meant something that developers build applications on top of, such as an operating system or a set of application programming interfaces (APIs). But the word has since come to refer to various kinds of software that run online, particularly those deployed by the largest tech firms.

For the purposes of this GitBook (and to the disappointment of Tarnoff), platform is roughly analogous to stage, building on the colloquialisation of the technology concept. Think about streaming platforms like YouTube or Digital Theatre+ to be proscenium arches; think about Twitch as an immersive show in a warehouse, where the audience can interact with each other; think about Gather.town as an interactive show in a pub; think about Zoom as a rough-and-tumble fringe stage. Per Naomi Bennett: ‘Our conception of space is actively evolving as we struggle to describe where exactly it is that we meet when entering into a Zoom room’. The nonplace of cyberspace is given a distinct shape based on the chosen platform, whether Zoom, YouTube, Twitch, virtual reality, or something else.