Platform Biography: A framework for analyzing the structures and dynamics of social media

Social media platforms have become influential in every sphere of communication, from the intimate and mundane to the public, professional, and political. It’s tempting to view a platform as a single “technology”—a static object that can be cast as a causal agent of societal change. But a closer look reveals that platform companies, their technologies, and the cultures that form through and around them constantly push against and reshape one another. If platforms are always changing, then how do we theorize, study, and compare them?

In this webinar, based on the book Twitter: A Biography, Microsoft Senior Principal Researcher Nancy Baym and Queensland University of Technology Professor Jean Burgess introduce an original approach to this problem: the Platform Biography, a systematic framework for analyzing social media platforms. The framework provides a toolbox of concepts and empirical methods to diagnose patterns of past and emerging change in the cultures, politics, and governance of platforms. The Platform Biography approach can be used and understood by researchers, students, and everyday users without privileged insider access to social media companies. Through its application to Twitter, Burgess and Baym will model how the approach can be used to study other platforms and apps.

In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:

Develop strategies for observing and understanding how user practices shape a platform’s technologies and business model, even as those forces shape user practices
Identify the elements continuously influencing one another to make a platform
Collect appropriate materials to conduct a Platform Biography
Narrow analytic focus to a platform’s most distinctive features

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