Three Approaches to Platform Studies: Cobweb, Billiard Balls, and Ant Societies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Digital media platforms are becoming increasingly subject to the sway of geopolitics, as seen during the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the US-China trade war. How are platforms becoming geopoliticized? What perspectives shall we use to make sense of the process? This theoretical paper reformulates conceptual apparatuses of liberalism, realism, and constructivism, each represented by a metaphor: the cobweb, billiard balls, and ant societies, respectively. The approaches are introduced, critiqued, and compared to understand platform geopoliticization more historically and imaginatively on global as well as regional and local scales. The discussions propel platform studies to be grounded and multi-layered, concerning not only the apex of politico-economic power but also grassroots and communal praxis, for example, metis. While the pendulum is swinging from transnational capital to nation-states, it is insufficient to restrict our thinking to (neo)realism vis-à-vis (neo)liberalism. A moderate version of constructivism—the “ant societies” model—hence needs articulation, which holds important conceptual and methodological implications.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".