The Platform Problem

In an early book on the “Theory” of photography, Thinking Photography (1983) Victor Burgin notes that photography (like all art) neither passively or neutrally reflects a pre-given, objective reality, nor abstractly expresses some kind of Romantic individualism of the artist. The meaning of a photograph depends “on our knowledge of the way objects transmit and transform ideology, and the ways in which photographs in their turn transform these. To appreciate such operations we must first lose any illusion about the neutrality of objects before the camera”. Ansel Adams famously preferred to talk about “making” pictures rather than “taking them”. And yet, there persists this idea that photographers simply “capture” a moment, an objective slice of an objective world. The idea that there is something called an “unedited” photo reflects this persistence, when not only are there numerous variables available to the photographer at the moment of clicking the shutter (shutter speed, aperture, ISO obviously, but also framing, composition, intentional under/overexposure, focal length and depth of field, negative space, etc), but various possibilities available in the transformation of the chemical traces (for film) or the digital data into a constructed representation of a visible (to humans) scene. The idea of an objective, unmediated “representation” of reality is profoundly false when dealing with photography, as with much else.

To me, this is part of the “platform problem”. In recent years, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have come under fire for not moderating their content - especially their political content - enough or in the right way. Sarah T. Roberts has written an important book on the details of content moderation, Behind the Screen, and yet platform CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg can argue to Congress that Facebook’s role is to provide an “objective” platform for some kind of political reality it finds already existing in the world. The platform’s function is, like the spurious idea of photography, to simply make available through technology an unmediated representation of a “real world” which no-one really has any agency in, no-one really controls, and we have to take it as we find it. Besides the deeply conservative fatalism of this argument, platforms are therefore able to mystify and disavow their active role in the construction of political (and other) representations, representations which are deeply implicated in the construction and reproduction of ideology.

This platform problem is especially prominent in journalism where, despite decades of research on the ways in which media constructs and reproduces particular representations of society which then become part of the hegemonic “manufacture of consent” necessary for our “free, democratic, and liberal” society, continue to insist on their objective and unmediated “reporting” of some kind of reality it finds ready made. In a Substack post from September 4, 2021, for example, The Line is able to remark that “It’s not the newspaper’s role to exacerbate, nor calm divisions in society — it’s the newspaper’s job to report on those divisions". This view, to any one who has read Noam Chomsky, Stuart Hall, and many others, must seem at best naive and at worst ideological in and of itself.

The platform problem derives primarily from an empiricist distinction between subject and object that is part of the scientific method that developed in the 17th century and which is such an integral part of the capitalist instrumental domination over nature (a nature it has to portray, in a Freudian repression, as always-already untouched by human activity. We “find” nature, we do not participate in it; hence the political unwillingness to accept anthropogenic climate change). More specifically, it derives from debates around the roles of publishers and printers in the production and dissemination of illegal literature (usually politically treasonous, religiously heretical, or sexually immoderate). The Romantic notion of the individual author and his (sic) total responsibility for his work conformed to social contract ideas of liberty and agency, while also giving publishers and printers away to avoid responsibility for the content they produced.

Libraries, too, have this platform problem. This is the idea that they are not responsible for content, they are only a platform for views they find already existing out there in the (unmediated, natural, implacable) real world. The hegemonic view of Intellectual Freedom gives them a philosophical perspective (as we now, also drawn from social contract theory and classical liberalism) which allows them to see themselves the way social media platforms, newspapers, printers, and publishers do: as merely finding ideas and opinions out there in a world they remain magisterially separate from, a social world they transcend rather than participate in. They can therefore reject any responsibilty, not only for the content, but for any social representation made under their imprint. Like the mark of Aldus Manutius, or the authority of The Times (both New York and London), or the trustworthiness of the BBC, libraries rely on a fictitious (professional) independence from the world and its social forces and dynamics in order to represent itself as a bastion of knowledge, trust, and authority in an ever-changing and increasingly confusing world. But this self-representation itself serves the manufacture and maintenance of consent. This is one aspect of representation in which libraries harness the platform problem for social and political ends.

The other is in the representation of social danger and social deviance. Hall has written a lot about how the media, in its insistence on simply “finding” and “reporting” on racist views in society, in fact constructs an image of people of colour as social deviant and dangerous, a threat to the social fabric. This biased representation is constructed in much the same way as a photographer constructs a photo, through emphasis and suppression, through selection, through perspective, and field of view, all of which are all but invisible to the viewer of the photo or the “consumer” of the media. Libraries too play this representational role, constructing poor (and mainly Indigenous) Winnipeggers as threats to bourgeois law and order by making them the object of unprecedented library security policy, or by selectively “platforming” transmisic speakers in library spaces. The CFLA’s selective weighing in on threats to intellectual freedom, focusing solely on trans rights activism, also does this kind of selective work while representing it as an objective response to something it finds in the world.

In Policing the Crisis, Hall et all describe in great detail how this process of construction and representation with respect to the “new” crime of mugging in the UK in the early 1970s. Mugging, imported with a whole raft of representational connotations from the US, was inherently racialized and served to connect Black Britons with the decline of law and order and “civilized” bourgeois standards in the minds of “right thinking people”. Hall et al’s description of the construction of a moral panic around Black violence maps almost exactly to the moral panic around trans lives we are currently living through. They write:

When the official reaction to a person, group of persons or series of events is out of all proportion to the actual threat offered, when ‘experts’, in the form of police chiefs, the judiciary, politicians and editors perceive the threat in all but identical terms, and appear to talk ‘with one voice’ of rates, diagnoses, prognoses and solutions, when the media representations universally stress ‘sudden and dramatic’ increases (in numbers involved or events) and ‘novelty’, above and beyond that which a sober, realistic appraisal could sustain, then we believe it is appropriate to speak of the beginnings of a moral panic.

Hall et all cite Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panic (1972) for a definition: “A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions…”

The platform problem allows social media owners, journalists, and librarians to disavow their active role in the constructions of these representations. The spurious neutrality (of the photographer “capturing” reality, of the journalist “reporting” on social issues, of the librarian “facilitating” access to information) is part and parcel of this mechanism of representation. Libraries are not unique in this respect; understanding their role in the larger ecosystem of ideology, hegemony, and representation is vital if we would rather things change than remain as they are.