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When New Technologies Become Older: Lessons for Studying Silicon Valley from the Past
Robyn Caplan1, Sophie Bishop2, Elena Maris3, Ysabel Gerrard2, Zoe Glatt4
1Duke University, United States of America; 2The University of Sheffield; 3University of Illinois-Chicago; 4London School of Economics
Silicon Valley is entering middle age. For all of its efforts to disrupt existing industries, platform companies, like Google and Facebook, have become institutions in their own right. But, as van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal (2018) have noted, platforms have been less engaged in revolution than they have in replacement, “gradually infiltrating in, and converging with” legacy institutions and practices (p.2). This roundtable considers platforms, and their use, within this context of replacement rather than revolution. Though platforms have been averse to being considered “media companies,” (Napoli & Caplan, 2017), this roundtable explores how to locate platforms within longer histories of media, and resist the fetishization of ‘newness,’ particularly in critique.
The roundtable will take on a case study approach, with each scholar responsible for a 5-minute lightning talk focused on one aspect of platforms within the context of the cultural industries, to facilitate a broader discussion of how scholars can trace (what we think of recent) phenomenon backward within history. Participants will discuss topics such as historical antecedents to the Facebook Oversight Board (Dr. Robyn Caplan), how advertisers have shaped public discourse and media industries throughout history (Dr. Sophie Bishop), historical precedents for the integration of contextual expertise into technology industries (Dr. Elena Maris), the cyclical resurfacing of moral panics around youth and media technologies (Dr. Ysabel Gerrard), and continuity and change between historic research on creative labor in legacy cultural industries and current formations of platformized creative labor (Zoe Glatt).
Within this context of replacement, rather than revolution, we hope to open a discussion with our colleagues at AoIR about how to consider platforms within the context of media history, as well as how platforms do/do not produce the conditions of their own historicity (Gitelman, 2008) through controlling availability to data, access, and corporate archives.
