Understanding Digital Platform Generativity from a Sociomaterial Perspective

Research on digital platform generativity has predominantly taken a substantivist view, considering digital platforms as relatively static, self-contained entities separated from their human actors. We argue this view, while intuitive and common sensical, also has a downside – biasing researchers and practitioners from understanding the dynamic and processual nature of digital platform constituted through generativity in the flow of time. We offer a sociomaterial view to consider digital platforms as an assemblage of enacted sociomaterial practices, enabling researchers to move from studying platforms to platform becoming, and from generativity to generating. We illustrate these ideas via a preliminary empirical study of how generativity is constituted by the performativity of a digital platform, as it is enacted by the human agencies entailed in its design and management. Ultimately, our study aims to take steps towards a sociomaterial theory of digital platform generativity that can contributes to the digital platform literature