Digital media infrastructures: pipes, platforms, and politics

TLDR

Digital media infrastructures, especially platforms, have become central to social, political, and economic life, prompting a scholarly focus on their material, cultural, and political dimensions. This special issue examines how an infrastructural lens reframes digital platform studies, raising questions about scale, labor, industry logic, regulation, state power, culture, and citizenship. The opening article critically reviews media infrastructure studies, situates digital platforms within broader media history and political economy debates, and advocates an inter‑medial, inter‑sectoral approach to understanding their entanglements.

Abstract

Over 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.