Digital platforms are not media in the traditional sense

Evidence

For the media structure of the public sphere, it is this platform character of the new media that represents the real novelty. It means that they dispense with the productive role of journalistic mediation and programme design performed by the old media; in this respect, the new media are not ‘media’ in the received sense. They radically alter the pattern of communication that has been dominant in the public sphere until now by empowering all potential users in principle to become independent and equally entitled authors. The ‘new’ media differ from their traditional counterparts in that digital companies make use of this technology to offer potential users the unlimited opportunities for digital networking like blank slates for their own communicative content. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 32

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the platform’s novelty as precisely the absence of journalistic mediation and editorial filtering that defined old media.
• XREF: Connects to the classic Media as Culture readings and the idea of media as experience-production vs transmission. — connects to: Digitalization is a third communications revolution comparable to the printing press — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 31; Traditional media are institutionalized and gatekept while social media are accessible and reciprocal; Platforms are universal media governed by uniform policies over heterogeneous communities. — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms,…, 427

Related

• Traditional media are institutionalized and gatekept while social media are accessible and reciprocal (similarity 0.86)
• Platforms are universal media governed by uniform policies over heterogeneous communities. (similarity 0.83)
• Digital media seemed to finally fulfill the bourgeois public sphere’s equality claim (similarity 0.82)
• Social media platforms simulate a public sphere they now merely exploit. (similarity 0.80)
• Platforms replace asymmetry with reciprocity but lose editorial filtering (similarity 0.80)
• Media orient citizens by sifting out intersubjectively shared interpretations of the world (similarity 0.79)
• Social media may be changing citizens’ perception of the public sphere itself (similarity 0.79)