Dead-and-dying platforms: a roundtable

McCammon, Muira; Virgilio, Diami; Ogden, Cody; Ackermann, Kevin; Zuckerman, Ethan; Gehl, Robert W.; Akhtar, Saima; Al-Azri, Sultan; Steele, Catherine Knight; Hamilton, Amber M.; Ben-David, Anat; Wasserman, Sarah; Namusoga-Kaale, Sara; Rankin, Joy Lisi

doi:10.1080/24701475.2022.2071396

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 15 publications

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“…Future research should examine users’ perspectives on the features described here, asking what prompts some to stop using the app and, conversely, what keeps others engaged. Scholars may also use this analysis to think more dynamically about “dead and dying” platforms (McCammon et al, 2022). BeReal prompts us to stop everything and adhere to a platformed version of what it means to “be real” with ourselves, our friends, and the world.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Everyone Stop What You’re Doing and BeReal: Live Networked Publics and Authenticity on BeReal

Taylor

2023

Social Media + Society

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This article critically analyzes the BeReal social media platform, considering how its infrastructure enables a new kind of networked public. I utilize the walkthrough method to examine how BeReal’s “environment of expected use” and vision aims to instill authenticity as a value and ideal for users. I also employ the concept of networked public as a framework to understand how BeReal organizes attention and action through networked technologies that create both a mediated space and collection of people. From this analysis of BeReal’s digital structure, I develop the concept of a live networked public to characterize BeReal’s ability to coordinate interpersonal and global connections to a specific temporality. Furthermore, I connect live networked public to a concept of authenticity in the app’s design by arguing that BeReal’s concept of “realness” is contingent on its unique affordances. Particular features not only support the core network public on the app, but guide behaviors to encourage a particular version of “sporadic” authenticity. This version is useful for BeReal’s branding as the “most authentic” platform in competition with other social media apps. This work combines scholarship on networked publics and affordances, with that on liveness—specifically online and group liveness. Given that BeReal’s skyrocketing popularity tapered off, this study also highlights the importance of analyzing newcomers to the social media ecosystem that promise and play with new ways of being and interacting online.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Everyone Stop What You’re Doing and BeReal: Live Networked Publics and Authenticity on BeReal

Taylor

2023

Social Media + Society

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The production of destruction: How employee values shape platform afterlives

Corry

2024

New Media & Society

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This article addresses how platform closure is produced by drawing on interviews with former employees of MySpace, the social media platform popular in the mid-2000s. Focusing on how staff grappled with user-generated content and user data while sunsetting an old version of the MySpace platform in 2011 to make way for a newly configured MySpace platform that debuted in 2013, it chronicles the decisions that platform employees were faced with while closing a platform, and the values and worldviews that ultimately shaped what remained of the old site. The article shows that sunsetting a platform and acts of technological destruction more generally are not arbitrary or neutral processes with fixed outcomes, but rather processes of sociotechnical production that vary in consequential ways.

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Dead-and-dying platforms: a roundtable

Cited by 2 publications

References 15 publications

Everyone Stop What You’re Doing and BeReal: Live Networked Publics and Authenticity on BeReal

Everyone Stop What You’re Doing and BeReal: Live Networked Publics and Authenticity on BeReal

The production of destruction: How employee values shape platform afterlives

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