Platform Phenomenologies: Social Media as Experiential Infrastructures of Urban Public Life

Platforms have emerged as some of the most disruptive, yet also increasingly ordinary, dynamics of contemporary urban life. As Barns (2019) notes, even as platforms might be understood as proprietary technological ecologies, which thrive on user surveillance and extracting value from user data, they are also reshaping everyday socio-spatial experience with indefinite consequences. For Barns, negotiating this “pivot” between the technical, commercial and embodied implications of an emergent platform urbanism will require diverse epistemologies (see also contributions to Rodgers and Moore, 2018). In this chapter, we argue for a phenomenological perspective on social media, approaching them as experiential infrastructures of everyday urban communication. While our argument is primarily conceptual, we will also draw on recent research we have conducted into the role social media has played in mediating public exchanges about a controversial cycling program in Walthamstow, East London, UK. We will pay particular attention to how such exchanges emerge through real-time-like experiences of locality, mediated by both the technical features of social media platforms and their everyday practical dynamics. These temporalities of social media amount to relatively novel forms of urban public life, the stakes and consequences of which are ambiguous