Platform-Literacy. How Deliberative Media Platforms May Shape Public Discourses

Intermediaries like Facebook, Google, or Apple News have long since become ecosystems for public discourse. Recent studies have highlighted their impact on the production and dissemination of news (E. Bell et al., 2018; E. J. Bell & Owen, 2017; Newman et al., 2019) and emphasized the infrastructural power of platforms (Gillespie, 2010; Schulz & Dankert, 2016) in terms of a shift towards a ‘platformization’ of the media landscape in general (Dobusch, 2016, 2016; Helmond, 2015; Nieborg & Helmond, 2019). Other scholars have argued from a normative perspective, asking for new skills and types of knowledge in the light of a platformized public sphere: Recent research has provided a deeper understanding of the general concept of data literacy as “Tool Criticism” (van Es et al., 2018), “statistical literacy” (Engel et al., 2019), data “infrastructure literacy” (Gray et al., 2018) or even “platform-literacy” (Caines, 2018). According to the concept of deliberative democracy (Habermas, 1992), political participation through the media is crucial (Kneuer, 2016). This paper focusses on a new generation of media-outlets and media-professionals that can be characterized by their explicit dedication to deliberative journalism (Prinzing & Pranz, im Erscheinen). Emerging from a platformized media landscape, these players have developed a platform-strategy trying to become as independent as possible from “infrastructural capture” (Nechushtai, 2018) by other platforms. We argue that they draw on specific knowledge on platforms that is characterized by economic and infrastructural as well as normative considerations that we address with the term “platform-literacy”. In order to understand this literacy, we conduct explorative interviews with media professionals from Germany and Switzerland that are involved in creating alternative media-outlets: What organizational strategies are implied to realize participation? Which frames are used to describe the political dimension of their work? Furthermore, what skillsets/knowledge are/is needed to perform the deliberative function? The proposal addresses topic area 2 and reflects use and target group conceptions of such media platforms in the process of deliberation as well as implicit potentials e.g. for political actors.