K&K - Kultur og Klasse

Plattformisering

Knut Ove Eliassen, Bjarki Valtýsson, Nina Lager Vestberg — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Platformisering

Thomas Poell, David Nieborg, José van Dijck; Karl Gunnar Mosbæk Dejgaard — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Globalt opererende platformsvirksomheder, fra Facebook til Uber og fra Amazon til Coursera, bliver mere og mere centrale for det offentlige og private liv og transformerer vigtige økonomiske sektorer og livssfærer, herunder journalistik, transport, underholdning, uddannelse samt finans- og sundhedssektorerne. Denne transformation kan forstås som en ”platformisering-proces”, som artiklen forsøger at kontekstualisere, definere og operationalisere.

Denne artikel hører til Concepts of the digital society, en specialiseret afdeling af Internet Policy Review.

Gæsteredigeret af Christian Katzenbach og Thomas Christian Bächle.

Licens: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Germany

Musik eller støj

Johan Lau Munkholm, Anders Bach Pedersen — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

In our global contemporary moment beset with economic and political crises, the digital platform has emerged as a prevailing economic and cultural form that strongly impacts the current direction and order of digitally mediated society. Siphoning money and data from their position in medias res of global digital networks, the most powerful platforms approach monopoly power and gain the capacity to impose their own logics to a multitude of sectors that rely on digital infrastructure to distribute goods, services and interactions. More radically, as globally distributed infrastructures, platforms gain the capacity to decide what qualifies as a valid existence to be mediated at all. The power of platforms therefore implies power over being, ontological power. In this contribution, we conceptualize the power to shape interactions and to decide over digital being as platform power. We will explore what platform power consists in, how it was gained and what consequences it has for cultural production in contemporary society. We do this specifically by analyzing the platform power of Spotify which is a key node for the digital distribution of music. We show how Spotify’s platform power manifests itself as an aesthetic hegemony that influences music production in the 21^stcentury. As a guarantor of sonic and cultural order, Spotify intervenes in the very being of music by imposing a logic that differentiates and decides between what is music and what is noise.

Benjamin på BookTok

Gitte Balling, Jack Andersen — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility” remains relevant in relation to discussing what happens to our perceptions of art and culture. The text was written in a media-related time of revolution, where the concepts of aura, originality and authenticity were discussed in light of the advent of mass media and their consequences for the perception of unique works and performances. Benjamin's relevance has only been further accentuated in a digital age, where mass-produced reproductions of texts, music and performing arts are ubiquitous, and questions of originality and uniqueness must therefore be reassessed. The question is thus, what is perceived as authentic on digital platforms? One of the fastest growing platforms these years, Tiktok has emerged as the leading social platform for sharing information and entertainment. One of its subgroups, BookTok, connects under #booktok young readers with other readers. Characterized by being peers-readers, the “Booktokers” have greater influence, especially among young people and also among young people, who normally do not read. One of the reasons must be sought in the aesthetic culture and practice that Booktok represents. The platform's format and its affordances seem to matter. Soundbites, the use of hashtags as a form of communication and classification, easy access and reuse of other people's use of # or sound files make it easy to access. Characteristic of Booktok is that the videos are entertaining and often driven by emotions and affect. The book readers cry, love or hate books and experience a community and a recognition of their book choices and reading experiences. Authenticity here seems to be connected with emotions, interaction and commitment, the medium seems to generate effects not uncomparable to those analyze as auratic by Walter Benjamin.

Rebeller med en platform

Jacob Ølgaard Nyboe, Ana Stanićević — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Mikrofest

is an online bookstore promoting and selling books from small independent presses exclusively. Its raison d'être is to counterweigh the difficulties small presses experience with regards to gaining publicity, visibility and space within the traditional media and bookstores. In our article we analyze how the small presses through

Mikrofest

enter the world of digital platforms – and thus try to make one of the newer technologies work for them instead of against them. Through a rhetorical analysis it is demonstrated how the platform presents itself to maintain the image of idealistic and anti-mainstream outsiders that are crucial to most small presses. The analysis is supported by a semi-structured interview with the founders to gain insight into relevant technical issues and be able to compare our findings with their original intentions. Furthermore, we include a small survey among the participating presses to assess how their values are represented by the platform and to which extent the mission to turn the spotlight on the small presses is fulfilled. We conclude that

Mikrofest

succeeds in preserving values widely shared in the small press community while entering the world of online trading and thus represents an alternative way of using digital platforms. The represented presses are in general quite satisfied with the collaboration, but this is due to the community it offers rather than financial gain as the latter is assessed to be diminutive.

Lydbøker, plattformlogikk, litteraturpolitikk

Øyvind Prytz — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

The article argues that the subscription-based streaming services for literature in Norway, and the increased use of audiobooks that the streaming services facilitate, must be understood in the light of the platform concept and the media logic that the platforms bring with them. It is not the audiobook format itself that challenges the literary policy goals of diversity, quality, and accessibility, but rather the usage patterns that the streaming services facilitate, the interface in the mobile applications, and the algorithmic recommendations that the platforms offer. Still, the situation is not clear-cut: In many ways, the field of literature in Norway is both paper book-based and consensus-oriented, and there is a clear political will to regulate the platforms and to protect the written word. Examining the Norwegian audiobook field using the concept of platform contributes both to a more nuanced understanding of the audiobook as a medium, and a more nuanced understanding of the platforms’ effects on the dominant patterns of cultural production and cultural consumption.

Litteraturens platformisering mellem høj- og lavkultur

Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Cultural consumption changes when platformization supports individualized media content across genres and media. Based on the concept of platformization, the article describes and examines how practices of reading literature develop in the light of digital systems. In continuation of a larger media debate in Denmark in the autumn of 2023 regarding authors’ salaries related to streaming services, the article analyzes how the qualities attributed to audiobooks affect conditions and cultural value hierarchies in the contemporary Danish literary public.

Heksekunster på Instagram

Solveig Daugaard — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Based on the practice of Danish writer, performance artist, and visual artist Olga Ravn who maintains an active presence on social media platforms such as Instagram, this article explores a new cross-aesthetic artistic figure it coins as the artfluencer. It uses Ravn’s practice as a tread stone for a broader exploration of this figure and the changing techno-aesthetic conditions of art production, it is a result of. Such post-digital media conditions stimulate artistic practices that, like Ravn’s, master the interplay between analog and digital materiality and can navigate platform synergies and changing structures of participation. By challenging a marketing-oriented vocabulary that has characterized research in the field, the article contributes with a new approach to the growing group of art and cultural producers who operate partly as digital media creators inscribed in the infrastructures of digital platforms, and partly as actors within more traditional, established institutions of art and culture. It also discusses the platform-dependent community of artists and cultural producers whose exchange and co-creation are part of their overall artistic expression and to which Ravn belongs. The art production in this cross-aesthetic and post-digital intersection draws on a cult of personality rooted in the Romantic notion of genius while also challenging the notion of the solo artist and the boundaries between art forms through co-creation and protest strategies known from the historical avant-gardes.

Platforme, museer og magt

Bjarki Valtýsson — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100

In this article, Valtysson investigates the impact of digital platforms on museums and how different museum workers perceive and react to the changing power dynamics caused by platformisation. This study is anchored in qualitative interviews with museum professionals at museums and exhibition spaces in Denmark and Norway and asks why and how different occupational identities within the museums perceive the advantages and disadvantages of engaging in digital platform communication, and how this affects the museum’s established role as an important actor within the field of cultural production. Findings indicate that the museums use digital platforms for various purposes, such as advocating for onsite activities, digitizing and making collections available for public use, and communicating with their online publics. Their platform communication does, however, also reveal challenges with regards to professional hierarchization internally amongst museums’ staff, and externally, problematic shifts in the power over the communication on popular platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube that are owned and operated by global Tech Giants.