Return to Frankfurt (from Frankfurt).

Communication criticism of the platformization of culture

Abstract

The work seeks to articulate a theoretical reflection on contemporary platformization processes with some of the problematizations of the Frankfurt School that have attracted the attention of communication studies: the criticism of the cultural industry, the division between free time and work time. Returning to the approaches of Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer to think about platformization may seem like an anachronism, but here we try to demonstrate that in their reflections there are conceptual elements that allow us to come closer to understanding the forms and effects of the platformization of social life. The article participates in a trend in research that implies a movement from the discussion of platforms as “things” to an analysis of platformization as a process that affects multiple areas of life. It interrogates a particular region of this dominant process: the platformization of culture. To be even more specific, it is about exploring the relationship between advertising platforms – Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok: “social networks”– and culture, as they extend the commodification of free time, expand the technical reproducibility of life and absorb part of the entertainment function of the cultural industry. We would like to demonstrate that the effectiveness of advertising platforms in capturing an increasingly longer lifespan is explained by the overdetermined articulation they carry out between statistics, marketing, entertainment and reproducibility. Scrolling, as a practice of algorithmic reception, constitutes the most naturalized expression of this articulation. This communication critique of the platformization of culture aims to be a contribution to the elucidation of social transformations whose course remains to be seen