In the current research on media and communication, Western internet companies (e.g., Google and Facebook) are typically described as digital platforms, yet these actors increasingly rely on infrastructural properties to expand and maintain their market power. Through the case study of the Chinese social media application, WeChat, we argue that WeChat is an example of a non-Western digital media service that owes its success first to its platformization and then to the infrastructuralization of its platform model. Moreover, our findings showed that the infrastructuralization of the WeChat platform model in China is shaped by markedly techno-nationalist media regulations and an increasingly overt cybersovereignty agenda. Drawing on the results of the analysis of technical documentation, business reports, as well as observations and interviews, we first present WeChat as both a platform and an infrastructure, and then we contextualize WeChat in the history of ICT infrastructure and the development of the internet in China. Finally, we analyze the specific role of the WeChat Pay service in establishing a new monetary transaction standard. We conclude by inquiring whether this emerging techno-nationalist model could be a plausible platform regulation in the future.

Over the past decade, a growing body of scholarship in media studies and cognate disciplines has emphasized the social, material, cultural, and political dimensions of the infrastructures that undergird and sustain media and communication networks and cultures across the world. This infrastructural turn assumes greater significance in relation to digital media and in particular, the influence that digital platforms have come to wield. Having "disrupted" many sectors of social, political, and economic life, many of the most widely used digital platforms now seem to operate as infrastructures themselves. This special issue explores how an infrastructural perspective reframes the study of digital platforms and allows us to pose questions of scale, labor, industry logics, policy and regulation, state power, cultural practices, and citizenship in relation to the routine, everyday uses of digital platforms. In this opening article, we offer a critical overview of media infrastructure studies and situate the study of digital infrastructures and platforms within broader scholarly and public debates on the history and political economy of media infrastructures. We also draw on the study of media industries and production cultures to make the case for an inter-medial and intersectoral approach to understanding the entanglements of digital platforms and infrastructures. AbstractOver the past decade, a growing body of scholarship in media studies and other cognate disciplines has focused our attention on the social, material, cultural, and political dimensions of the infrastructures that undergird and sustain media and communication networks and cultures across the world. This infrastructural turn assumes greater significance in relation to digital media and in particular, the influence that digital platforms have come to wield. Having "disrupted" many sectors of social, political, and economic life, many of the most widely used digital platforms now seem to operate as infrastructures themselves. This special issue explores how an infrastructural perspective reframes the study of digital platforms and allows us to pose questions of scale, labor, industry logics, policy and regulation, state power, cultural practices, and citizenship in relation to the routine, everyday uses of digital platforms. In this opening article, we offer a critical overview of media infrastructure studies and situate the study of digital infrastructures and platforms within broader scholarly and public debates on the history and political economy of media infrastructures. We also draw on the study of media industries and production cultures to make the case for an inter-medial and inter-sectoral approach to understanding the entanglements of digital platforms and infrastructures.

This article investigates the work of processors who curate and “clean” the data sets that researchers submit to data archives for archiving and further dissemination. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the data processing unit of a major US social science data archive, I investigate how these data processors work, under which status, and how they contribute to data sharing. This article presents two main results. First, it contributes to the study of invisible technicians in science by showing that the same procedures can make technical work invisible outside and visible inside the archive, to allow peer review and quality control. Second, this article contributes to the social study of scientific data sharing, by showing that the organization of data processing directly stems from the conception that the archive promotes of a valid data set—that is, a data set that must look “pristine” at the end of its processing. After critically interrogating this notion of pristineness, I show how it perpetuates a misleading conception of data as “raw” instead of acknowledging the important contribution of data processors to data sharing and social science.

Web-based platforms play an increasingly important role in managing and sharing research data of all types and sizes. This article presents a case study of the data storage, sharing, and management platform Figshare. We argue that such platforms are displacing and reconfiguring the infrastructure of norms, technologies, and institutions that underlies traditional scholarly communication. Using a theoretical framework that combines infrastructure studies with platform studies, we show that Figshare leverages the platform logic of core and complementary components to re-integrate a presently splintered scholarly infrastructure. By means of this logic, platforms may provide the path to bring data inside a scholarly communication system still optimized mainly for text publications. Yet the platform strategy also risks turning over critical scientific functions to private firms whose longevity, openness, and corporate goals remain uncertain. It may amplify the existing trend of splintering infrastructures, with attendant effects on equity of service.

The release of the Google Maps API in 2005 spurred a trend of mapping mashups, adding cartography to online participatory culture. This article will present how the affordances of these ‘platforms’ give shape to the online participation of concerned citizens willing to access information during an environmental crisis. Based on the analysis of the radiation mashups created after the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in 2011, this article will highlight two types of online participation. First, participation as data extraction, where concerned actors either monitored data using Geiger counters or extracted and republished data from official websites. Second, participation as data aggregation, where maps were used to display and compare radiation measurements from official or crowdsourced venues. The conclusion will highlight the necessity to study how online platforms assign a place and temporality to online participation.

Archival data processing consists of cleaning and formatting data between the moment a dataset is deposited and its publication on the archive’s website. In this article, I approach data processing by combining scholarship on invisible labor in knowledge infrastructures with a Marxian framework and show the relevance of considering data processing as factory labor. Using this perspective to analyze ethnographic data collected during a six-month participatory observation at a U.S. data archive, I generate a taxonomy of the forms of alienation that data processing generates, but also the types of resistance that processors develop, across four categories: routine, speed, skill, and meaning. This synthetic approach demonstrates, first, that data processing reproduces typical forms of factory worker’s alienation: processors are asked to work along a strict standardized pipeline, at a fast pace, without acquiring substantive skills or having a meaningful involvement in their work. It reveals, second, how data processors resist the alienating nature of this workflow by developing multiple tactics along the same four categories. Seen through this dual lens, data processors are therefore not only invisible workers, but also factory workers who follow and subvert a workflow organized as an assembly line. I conclude by proposing a four-step framework to better value the social contribution of data workers beyond the archive.

Ouvrir la boîte à outils de la recherche numérique Trois cas de redistribution de méthodes Résumé : Les méthodes numériques mobilisées dans le cadre de recherches en sciences humaines et sociales (SHS) sont souvent présentées comme des innovations radicales par rapport aux méthodes existantes. Selon Noortje Marres (2012a), ces dernières sont davantage « redistribuées » afin de s'adapter aux caractéristiques du support numérique. Si ces méthodes ne sont donc pas radicalement différentes, elles renouvellent toutefois des débats épistémologiques provenant du croisement entre informatique et SHS. Cet article analyse trois débats particulièrement importants et illustre chacun d'eux par une approche spécifique de recherche numérique. Les Digital Humanities interrogent la possibilité d'un dialogue entre sciences exactes et SHS, dont les épistémologies sont traditionnellement séparées ; les Cultural Analytics interrogent la possibilité de faire de la recherche en SHS à partir de grandes masses de données ; enfin, les Digital Methods interrogent la nécessité de créer des méthodes spécifiques pour appréhender un nouvel objet numérique. En conclusion, le potentiel applicatif et réflexif de ces travaux pour les recherches en sciences de l'information et de la communication (SIC) sera mis en évidence.

More than a decade after the creation of the major digital platforms we use every day, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Airbnb, it is still surprisingly difficult to define them. Anyone seeking commonalities between all these entities will face a proliferation of terms to define them, most of them loosely revolving around the idea of platforms serving as intermediaries. The complexity of their technologies or their corporate culture of secrecy further undermines the possibility of knowing exactly how they work. This opacity comes as a great paradox given the massive number of users and the plurality of sectors in which digital platforms operate today. Researchers in Internet studies and digital media studies already engage deeply with the social implications of digital technologies writ large, including platforms. The past few years have seen the publication of books that take a far more critical approach to digital technologies than authors from the aughts. Instead of emphasizing the innovative means of cultural production (Jenkins, 2006) or political mobilization (Benkler, 2006) that Internet technologies afford, recent books have critically examined the social consequences of the use of social media for online mobilization (Tufekci, 2017), the applications of big data science (O'Neil, 2017; Schneier, 2015), black-boxed algorithms (Pasquale, 2015), or data-driven social services (Eubanks, 2018). Taken together, these books offer a critical reading of the largely negative social consequences of the various technologies that increasingly shape the digital infrastructures of our daily life. Within this context and landscape, two recently published books offer a critical take on the increasing power of digital platforms play in varied social contexts worldwide.