'Good' platform-political reasons for 'bad' platform-data. Zur sozio-technischen Geschichte der Plattformaktivitäten Fav, Retweet und Like

In this article, we explore the relation between platform activities and their usage practices. Taking departure from predefined activities offered by social media platforms, this paper inquires into what may happen if platform features cater to opposing user practices. The paper investigates whether the data they produce can be considered as ‘bad’ platform data, just as Harold Garfinkel conceptualized ‘bad’ clinical records, and does so by engaging with the socio-technical history of Facebook’s Like and Twitter’s retweet and favourite button and their associated cultures of usage. In a first step, we question popular bottom-up narratives that presenti platform features as appropriations of emergent user practices, such as in the case of the retweet button. In a second step, we draw on ethnographic research on the German Favstar sphere - a group of popular Twitter amateurs with specific cooperation practices - to trace the divergent and at points even contradictory user practices in the case of the favourite button. In both cases, the politics of data visibility are of central importance, and a third group of actors appears besides the platform and its users, which recombines existing platform data into new contexts according to specific practices of usage for features. Such ‘satellite platforms’, we argue, can provide ‘good’ platform-political reasons for platform activities to produce ‘bad’ data

A reality check(list) for digital methods

Digital Methods can be defined as the repurposing of the inscriptions generated by digital media for the study of collective phenomena. The strength of these methods comes from their capacity to take advantage of the data and computational capacities of online platforms; their weakness comes from the difficulty to separate the phenomena that they investigate from the features of the media in which they manifest (‘the medium is the message’, according to McLuhan’s 1964 dictum). In this article, we discuss various methodological difficulties deriving from the lack of separation between medium and message and propose eight practical precautions to deal with it