In connection with some work I'm doing (which is decidedly more down-to-earth), I found myself wondering about two terms we in the media industry use frequently: 'platform' and 'property'. I came up with some tentative characterisations which I set out below.
Warning: this is a very theoretical post. Please ignore this is not your cup of tea. If it is, do read on and please tell me what you think.
A platform is (a) a consumer device that is used to experience 'content', with (b) an associated practice that includes ways of selecting such content and (c) clear rules that delimit what a media 'property' is.
A property is a 'place', accessible within a platform (it is thus 'content'), which is wholly controlled by its owner--who need not be the platform owner. By 'wholly controlled' I mean that (i) the property owner can publish and arrange content at will without having to seek permission, and generally taylor the consumer experience subject to (ii) structural, impartial rules which may be technological or contractual and apply equally to all property owners, and which allow for (iii) enough flexibility to constitute a language, including the ability to publish and update content as often as the platform allows.
It is key that the rules in (ii) be impartial and generally understood by audiences, even if only tacitly. It is only thanks to them that the notion of property can exist, because it allows audiences to distinguish the responsibilities of platform and property owners--and thus ultimately to assign authorship, which is the essence of content. Thus, for example, if my cable provider decides to block a movie being broadcast on a TV channel and replace it with something 'better', I intuitively know that the channel is not responsible for this; that the cable provider is violating the integrity of the channel; and that by doing this it is also violating my right of access to the channel. Similarly, I don't expect to get interrupted by the cable operator to tell me of breaking news when I am watching a movie channel. Note that the concept of channel presupposes the framework of rules implied here--without them there would be no sense of 'access' to a channel (another key concept), and hence no sense of 'channel'.
Whenever a private platform includes properties that belong to third parties, a need arises for rules like these. It might seem at first that some platforms (e.g. WAP walled-gardens) are wholly owned while others are public (e.g. the web); this may be so, but nothing is so clear-cut here and every claim is contestable. Cable networks may be private but 'must carry' rules ensure that they give access to channels, which they can't withhold or tamper with. This turns operators, at least to an extent, into 'access providers', which puts them in a very regulated regime.
Access rules would not make sense without a prior sense of something to grant access to, whose existence in turn depends on these rules--the dependency is circular.
Finally, all of this sheds some light on the notion of 'content', on which I've written before. To experience content you need to 'see beyond' the platform; to get absorbed in what is being said, or shown, and stop paying attention to how--much in the same way that fluent speakers of a language don't need to pay attention to the words or grammar being used. Key to this is the existence of (implicit and vague, but observed) rules on how to speak, without which no communication (or sense of authorship) is possible.
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