Social Media Digital Architectures : A Platform-First Approach to Political Communication and Participation

• This chapter outlines the architectural approach to researching digital politics. An architectural approach focuses on platform structures and how they mediate, and can actively affect, users’ political agency online and offline. I first chart the lineage of architectural approaches in the social sciences, from discourse architectures to digital architectures. Then, I describe the process of ‘mapping,’ which theorizes how the functions of social media are built into empirically observable elements of platform design. To illustrate this mapping process, I present four functions of social media and map them onto various features of mainstream social media platforms. The purpose is to show how platform design features can have concrete implications for political processes. Here, the political process under examination is citizens’ political participation. Ultimately, my intent with this chapter is argue against the use of conceptually vague concepts like affordances by providing an alternative and less ambiguous concept – namely, digital architectures.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap -- Medievetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications -- Media Studies (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap -- Mänsklig interaktion med IKT (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications -- Human Aspects of ICT (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap -- Systemvetenskap, informationssystem och informatik med samhällsvetenskaplig inriktning (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications -- Information Systems, Social aspects (hsv//eng)

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