Paraplatforms

Abstract

In this short commentary, I suggest the term “paraplatform” as a means of expanding the purview of platform studies. The hope is that this conceptual term may open different analytic routes to platform histories and geographies; different formations of the platform society; different objects; and different lineages informing platforms and platform capitalism.

Platform studies research has finally found a forum: Platforms & Society. Having a forum does not mean being settled; instead, it offers greater freedom in pushing the boundaries of platform studies itself. A multidisciplinary field to begin with, the editors’ goals for this journal (Chen et al., 2024, p. 1) signal the opportunity to pluralize platform studies. To this end, I offer one conceptual provocation that allows us to start thinking about the “around” of platforms, or their surroundings, in ways that open other research agendas. This around is not only the societies in which platforms are embedded and in turn, transform; but rather more specifically the technical ensembles, retail forms, and other various conditions on which platforms depend. I suggest the term paraplatform, as a means of expanding the purview of platform studies and contributing a conceptual term that may help find different analytic routes to its histories and geographies, different formations of the platform society, or platform capitalisms. ¹

By paraplatform I draw on media studies scholar Jonathan Gray's interpretation of Jean Genette's literary term paratext: everything around the text that in turn informs the text (Genette, 1997; Gray, 2010). In Show Sold Separately, Gray (2010) demonstrates how things thought as incidental to the main text of the film or television show—notably paratextual trailers, ads, memes, commentary, and so on – are in fact crucial to viewers’ understandings of these texts. Simply put: paratexts condition how the texts themselves are seen and experienced. Likewise, platforms do not exist without the social, historical, institutional, and media equivalents of paratexts. These paraplatforms inform, condition, support, and operate around the platform. Here I suggest three different kinds of paraplatforms:

Outside the platform (in a narrow sense of the multisided market, the app, the interface, and the backend), but supporting it (i.e., not a platform but near to it). As an example of this, I think of the crucial role of batteries for the e-bike-dependent gig workers in Chen and Sun's analysis of platform-mediated food delivery workers in Beijing (Chen and Sun, 2020). The batteries are not platforms per se, but they are essential components of the platform economy's assemblage in Beijing. Similarly, the dormitories that house workers producing platform hardware, adopt a just-in-time labor model that coincides with the just-in-time temporality of the gig economy at large (Andrijasevic et al., 2021). Van Doorn and Shapiro term this platform-adjacent, by which they call attention to the elements that make the gig economy tick “‘upstream’ as well as ‘downstream’—from investment chains and tax avoidance schemes to restrictive welfare and migration policies” (Van Doorn and Shapiro, 2023, p. 3). ²

Second, preceding the platform historically, informing the platform industrially, and hence part of platform history or platformization as a process. Here the temporal dimension of the “para” is key, signaling things that are historical predecessors or possibly lineages of the platform. We can think of the convenience store as a platform precursor in the case of i-mode in Japan, wherein the internet-connected proto-smartphone was modeled on the convenience store experience (Steinberg, 2019, 2024). Alternatively, Athique's (2019) emphasis on the emporium as a “structural analogy” to the platform as transactional space is another way to consider not historical trajectory but structural parallels, offering a way to rethink what platforms do. Zhang's (2023) emphasis on the tensions between collectivist production and the individualizing tendencies of platforms suggests how what is outside or para the platform can also generate dialectical tension with the on-platform. This is a tension between platform-based labor (“e-commerce customer platform customer service, website design”) versus platform-mediated labor (basket weaving and other outside-the-platform labor “performed by those who manufacture, package, and deliver e-commerce goods”) (Zhang, 2023, p. 105).

Third, around the platform and of the platform in a more direct sense. The venture capital that funds the platform enterprise (Van Doorn and Shapiro, 2023); the smartphone that mediates gig work or streaming video platforms; and the data connectivity that is the essential infrastructure of the smartphone (Mukherjee, 2019). These are most directly part of the platform as sociotechnical assemblage; but can also be thought of as conditions distinct from the platform (e.g., Amazon, Grab, etc.) most narrowly conceived.

“Para” designates that which is “beside; alongside of; beyond; aside from” (Para Definition and Meaning, n.d.). Besides, alongside, beyond; while this definition would seem to emphasize the spatial aspect of the para, I also take the beyond here to be time-based, making the term temporal as much as spatial, as we see in the three iterations sketched above. It suggests a temporal prefiguring (much as paratextual trailers precede the film that comes after), a preforming, as well as more spatial around the platform. This can be read in social terms. This para could designate how, drawing on Autonomist Marxist and feminist work (Terranova, 2000), the “platform factory” is profoundly dependent on the “social factory” (i.e., the forms of social reproduction that support the factory and allow the reproduction of labor force). Capitalism, the state, the state–market relationship, knowledge flows, and cultural practices are some of the many factors that shape what platforms will become—issues that have been the particular focus in work on platforms outside the “West” (Athique, 2019; Mukherjee, 2019; Steinberg, 2019; Zayani and Khalil, 2023; Zhang, 2023). The State may not be “in” or “of” the platform but it certainly informs it.

As a concrete example that brings together all three aspects noted above, we can look to the Japanese franchised convenience store. Convenience stores function as paraplatforms in the first sense: sites where platform labor is mediated and supported. The convenience store in Japan is often discussed in terms of its function as everyday “life infrastructure.” From food and drinks to utility bill payment, the convenience store supports work in the platform economy and beyond; operating alongside platforms in provisioning food and other services key to social reproduction within the platform economy.

Second, the convenience store functions as a historical precursor to, an inspiration for, and a continuing influence on the platform economy, in Japan in particular. We can think of its embrace of technological innovation, its commitment to service offerings as of the 1990s, and its e-commerce-adjacent functions such as in-store delivery of online purchases, or in-store purchases of things such as package tours or books. These indirectly inform the development of platforms or signal the store's early efforts at platformization. In another sense it also more directly informs the development of the platform economy in Japan and as it develops elsewhere via the internet-connected proto-smartphone. In this second aspect, the convenience store can be situated as one lineage of the platform economy (Steinberg, forthcoming) – a historical antecedent to it; informing it; one of its conditions of possibility.

Third, it continues to impact the platform economy's dependence on the feeling of convenience to this day (Neves and Steinberg, 2024)—suggesting the convenience store is also of the platform in the sense of historical precedence and participation in platformed life via its structure of feeling. That chains such as 7-Eleven themselves offer app-based food delivery and app-based payment systems suggests other ways the stores are platformized; are of the platform.

In sum, the term paraplatform can, I hope, be useful to platform scholars, students, and readers in all three senses. First, it is an invitation to think carefully about the synchronic conditions for or direct support of the platform economy. Second, it is a way to consider that which diachronically (i.e., historically) or synchronically informs the platform economy. Third, it allows us to make visible the other actors that support platforms, from batteries to venture capital—and in so doing starting to build a more granular picture of everything on platform and off. Building on these, the paraplatform is an invitation to think outside the platform per se that can allow us to pluralize the histories, geographies, and objects of study that inform this thing and field of study we call platforms, nuancing our understanding of their local embeddedness as well as their regional and global travels.