1.2 Theory on Platforms, Cultures, and Curating
The first point to be made after this conceptualization pertains to the role platforms in molding the curatorial logic and its related cultures. I understand platforms, from Google to Facebook and from Airbnb to Uber, as infrastructures mediating production, consumption, and exchange as well as business models involved in the processes of capitalization (Longley, 2017). When I speak of platforms throughout the book, I refer to commercial enterprises; this is not to say that non-commercial platforms do not exist but that it is the commercial platforms that unconditionally govern the internet space (Poell, Nieborg, and Dufy, 2022). There are two approaches to platforms that I will be drawing from, a broader and a narrower one. The broader focuses on platforms in macro sociological terms, as the digita manifestations of capitalist firms that bring together diferent multisided markets, including advertisers, developers, creators and users, and largely rely on the extraction and processing of data (Srnicek, 2017; Sadowski, 2019).8 Apart from GAFAM (Google [Alphabet], Amazon, Facebook [Meta], Apple and Microsoft), the term covers companies that have massively invested in digital services and make use of user data for productive ends, such as media conglomerates, like Walt Disney and Warner Bros, consumer electronics corporations, like Sony and Samsung, and broadcast and subscription on demand video streaming services (SVOD), like Netflix, Disney+ and HBO. There is a narrower approach that puts emphasis on how platforms enable the creative capacities of users, according to which platforms are “data infrastructures that facilitate, aggregate, monetize, and govern interactions between end-users and content and service providers” (Poell, Nieborg and Dufy, 2022: 5).9 Here the focus is on platforms as digital infrastructures which allow and enable cultural producers and everyday users to produce content within a larger “platform ecosystem” (Van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal, 2018:12), including creating apps in Google Play Store and App Store, videos on Amazon’s Twitch or Google’s YouTube, performances of the self in Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and ByDance’s Tik-Tok, to name a few. While the first approach mostly focuses on the macroscopic shifts in the political economy of capitalism, the emergence of new value chains or the command of algorithms, the second explores specific socio-cultural practices involving human actors, such as the rise of new cultural intermediaries and experts bypassing the filtering of traditional gatekeepers (Maguire and Matthews, 2012; Patel, 2020), the diferent forms of digital labor (Kneese and Palm, 2020), the content creator ecologies (Arriagada and Ibáñez, 2020) and crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and other digital forms of economic circulations (Langley and Leyshon, 2017). Without losing sight of the former macroscopic role of digital industries throughout the book, I will be mostly referring to the narrower function of platforms, as this is helpful for emphasizing their role in shaping cultural activity. The cultural production and general activity in fashion, food, and life coaching which I examine is shaped in a way that is constantly tending toward curation.
Introducing the Curatorial Imperative
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