Platform Studies

The study of contemporary media platforms such as gaming consoles, mobile phones, and social media websites can be understood as an extension of the longer history of apparatus theory, science and technology studies, and the archaeological turn in film and media studies. Platform studies also shares methodologies and theoretical frameworks with code studies, software studies, digital humanities, media infrastructure studies, and game studies. One of platform studies’ primary methodologies is the close inspection and analysis of the materiality of media technologies. By emphasizing the matter of media devices—their chips, wires, slots, sensors, plastic and anodized aluminum bodies—in other words, their thingness, platform studies considers what this matter can tell us about the forces and conditions that shape our media landscape. Taking apart and examining her VCR, for example, Caetlin Benson-Allott finds a filmic architecture that suggests a less rigid and more pleasurable model of spectatorship and sexual difference than...