The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (Astra Taylor)

I doubt I will ever think about internet use the same way as I did before I read The People’s Platform. Astra Taylor’s book is a well-researched critique of the way the internet is viewed as an “open” and “democratic” stage. While she admits that the internet is a communal place, she also points out that it is a capitalistic place. The internet has not freed us from the gatekeepers of media, but rather given the gatekeepers more gateways to keep.

Taylor explores modern media and the increased content control which the internet has provided to corporations. She discusses the “winner-take-all pattern of the web,” suggesting that it is not the masses who decide what is important on the web, but rather the corporations and the search engines who decide which links appear first in our browsers when we search a term. Tailored search engines like Google determine what we do and do not see based on what the search engine believes we, as consumers, will want to consume. “There may be more stuff out there than ever,” Taylor notes, “but there’s a chance we’re seeing less of it.”

Taylor also laments the decline of journalism, referring to the new form of “reporting” as “churnalism.” More news is really less news, repurposed and summarized to be churned out at an alarmingly fast rate with little fact checking. News stories are not based on what is important, but rather on what will gather the most views and therefore the higher ad revenue. This interpretation of modern journalism, I agree with. I’ve seen one too many “fluff” stories on online news sites and noticed that each article seems to simply regurgitate what every other source has already said.

The internet, as it currently exists, Taylor says, does not create a democratic place, hospitable to the fostering of culture, but rather a “free market” in which those with the money market “culture” to us and determine what we read, hear and view. A disconnect exists, in which the process of consuming culture is seen as more important than the creation of it.

Although I don’t agree with every last argument of The People’s Platform, the book is an eye opener and an important piece of the current discourse involving the purpose and function of internet in our society and in the creation of culture