Professional Documents
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Simon Collister
Department of Politics & International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of
London, Egham, TW20 0EX
simon.collister@gmail.com
Dan McQuillan
Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London; London SE14 6NW;
UK.
d.mcquillan@gold.ac.uk
'What are the particular forms of platform politics and how can we theorize such
forms and practices?'
Abstract
Chadwick (2007) and Chadwick and Stanyer (2010) have identified and started
to plot a series of shifts in media and political activist repertoires (Tilly, 1995)
“characterised by a complex intermingling” of platforms. They argue that this
‘hybridity’ is directly driven by the emergence, rapid growth and adoption of
Internet-based, social networked technologies and tools in parallel with a
contingent change in the patterns of behaviour and normative political values by
web-enabled citizens.
This approach challenges the assertion that the rise of proprietary, primarily
commercial platforms as primary interfaces of the Internet will restrict political
expression and activism by proposing a new form of heterogenous platform
politics that expresses itself through a complex hybridisation of commercial
platforms, open platforms and other digital and analogue and on and offline
spaces.
1
We propose adopting and testing this theoretical approach through an analysis
of the hybrid political repertoires played out during the recent uprising in Egypt
which saw a fluid and rapid transition of political information production and
sharing as well as activism spanning on and offline 'platforms' (McQuillan, 2011).
That is: the way on which activists (re)assembled political platforms and
networks during the uprising, as well as the way in which the state, government
and other strategic actors attempted to counter-act or ‘territorialize’ (DeLanda,
2006) these assemblages in order to exert control.
References:
McQuillan, D. (2011). New Social Networks With Old Technology What The
Egyptian Uprising Tells Us About Social Media. Forthcoming.