Fenwick McKelvey, a graduate student from Ryerson, working with Greg Elmer, posed an interesting question after our panel. What do we mean exactly when we talk about a new media “platform”? I use the term, but probably not in a particularly analytical way. I suppose in my mind, I was thinking of “platform” as sites that act as vessels for user contributions: YouTube, Flickr, even Craigslist, eBay. Wikipedia suggests that the term does not refer to such sites, but to hardware or software platforms that allow other tools to run, but I feel like I have often heard it used to describe sites that host content, not just tools.

This is worth thinking through. In fact, the main point of my talk today may actually beg that very question. I suggested that there’s a paradox for new media platforms for political involvement, where they may offer up their site as a certain kind of space, but it is the users who end up defining in powerful ways what the site offers and what kind of deliberation it hosts, because each subsequent user arrives at the site filled with their contributions, may only be true because I am thinking about new media “platforms” that have to be offered up first as an empty vessel, a la YouTube or Flickr. But of course, in those cases, the site provider can post their own content if they so choose, and may have at the start in order to get things going — though as the site grows, their contributions are dwarfed by the content provided by others. In our WikiCandidate project, we did not want to “prime” users in any way by putting even space-holding text — but this is an artifact of our particular desire to see what gets built, and to be able to ask communication questions as well as technology and politics ones. I could imagine other sites, like Remix America, where the very point is to fill the site with a certain kind of content, in order to encourage further contributions.

Is “platform” on of those terms, like “peer” or “amateur,” that is being adopted because it does some very particular cultural work in this mew media environment? Is it another discursive way to appear open, to make a promise of technological neutrality? The metaphor of a platform is a pretty compelling one: it raises you up, but it is flat and without walls, so its open to all and privileges no one. Its also worth remembering that the term has been long used in the political venue, in terms of a party’s platform, to suggest that the candidate stands on these principles. Is it a term that needs unpacking, as well as being more analytyically rigorous about it when we do scholarship on such tools?