Shining a light on tech platforms Major tech platforms like Google, Facebook and Airbnb have become an integral part of our daily lives, and these companies derive profit from social interactions on their websites. What are the discourses, the language, in which these platforms ask for our trust? This question is central to Dr Niels Niessen’s work in the Platform Discourses project. Many of the
biggest technology companies in the world today are associated not just with commercial products, but also a particular worldview or philosophical outlook. For example, earlier in his career Mark Zuckerberg published a manifesto in which he described Facebook as a platform that creates global communities. “It presents Facebook as a platform that helps to connect people all over the world,” says Dr Niels Niessen, a researcher at the Radboud Institute for Culture and History in the Netherlands. While Facebook does indeed help connect people and has an emancipatory function to some extent, ultimately the company is profit-driven, argues Dr Niessen. “Facebook doesn’t care about community, even though it may believe its own story that it does,” he says. “Looking at its structure, it derives profit from the social interactions that people have on it.”
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The social interactions of users are also central to the profitability of many other companies in what Dr Niessen describes as the platform economy. This doesn’t mean just social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, but also other major technology businesses such as Airbnb and Apple, now Dr Niessen is analysing the way in which these businesses try to gain the trust of users in the Platform Discourses project. “The project looks at digital online infrastructures. These infrastructures bring users together,” he explains. Alongside these companies, Dr Niessen and his colleagues are also studying several social media platforms. “We’re looking at the likes of Facebook and Apple, but also dating platforms like OkCupid and Tinder,” he says. “These dating platforms represent a different kind of social media platform, that brings customers together.”
Platform discourses project There are three separate sub-projects within the project as a whole, looking at how tech companies gain the trust of users for the introduction of what can be highly disruptive technologies. Methods of textual and visual analysis are being used to analyse the texts, images and moving images that these companies produce. “For example, Sidewalk Labs – a sister company of Google – was involved in a smart city project in Toronto, which eventually failed. They produced booklets and videos about what a smart city would look like. I look at these and ask; what is Sidewalk Labs’ vision of human life? A second project carried out by Rianne Riemens is on how tech companies talk about the climate crisis, as in Microsoft’s AI for Earth program,” Niessen outlines. “The third sub-project is on voice-user interfaces like Siri, in which my colleague Nuno Atalaia is analysing the way that tech companies introduce these new interfaces.”
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