Are platforms good to think with? Platforms arise from a long series of arrangements of people and things. Such arrangements lack the coherence of a device, machine or ‘system’, even if they include them. But platforms bind and constrict current configurations of collective life and perhaps digital social research. They might still enable something.

This book devises some experimental approaches to platform things, narratives, places and habits. It draws from science and technology studies (STS) and associated approaches to media, ontologies, knowledges and power. More than some other approaches, an STS-oriented inquiry might attend to the variety of platforms scattered across society-economy-nature-language-subject-object divisions. I hold one key question in mind throughout: does STS assemble the equipment and acumen to not only follow platforms as they diversify across human-nonhuman differences, but to understand how to survive on/in/with/off them? Experimental ontology in ensembles responds to that question.

How many platforms exist?

Many observers see the last two decades, for better or worse, as platform-time. In social sciences, researchers began by re-thinking knowledge as platform objectivity (Cambrosio et al 2004), economic relations as platform capitalism (Srnicek 2016), platform cooperativism (Scholz and Schneider 2017), a society as platform society (Van Dijck et al 2018), and platformization as a far-reaching transformation (Plantin and Punathambekar 2018), leading to platform urbanism (Leszczynski 2019) or perhaps just the latest version of media specificity (Acland 2015).