Disruption and Abrasion: American Social Media as Contested Infrastructures
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Disruption and Abrasion: American Social
Media as Contested Infrastructures
Christoph Raetzsch
In 2001, the American electronic music artist William Basinski
wanted to digitize a few of his older tape recordings. As the process
went on, the coating of the tapes was slowly coming off, bit by bit, sec-
ond by second. The result was an eerily repetitive loop that lost its initial
musical definition with every new iteration. These recordings became
a spectacle of disintegration with astounding meditative and aesthetic
qualities, published a year later as The Disintegration Loops (Kim). But
what made this idiosyncratic musical composition travel far beyond
its connoisseur audience was a video that Basinski recorded from his
apartment in Brooklyn that day. It recorded the smoke coming from
the empty space where the Twin Towers had fallen to the ground: the
disintegrating musical score of the loops appeared as the silent hymn
of a shattering moment in the history of the United States. It was 2001,
September 11.
This anecdote illustrates two interwoven narratives around the ef-
fects of digitization. In the first narrative, we find a simple illustration
of media change, the transition from one kind of medium to another,
where a process of disruption appears as a form of recoding information
for a different kind of material and logical support. The second narrative
concerns the social and political dimensions of this change in media,
where the disruption is felt less as a sudden disintegration but more as
a glacial process in which individual choices and new practices gradu-
ally change the very institutional framework of public articulation on all
levels. This latter narrative is about the politics of infrastructure, and it
is tightly related to the emergence of American social media as global
platforms of connectivity.
In this second narrative, users of social media individually and col-
lectively contribute to two related developments: they incrementally
Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 117-22 117 Christoph Raetzsch
weaken the institutional power of journalism and the press, and they
decide against a vision of the Internet as a non-proprietary, inclusive, and
widely accessible resource of information and communication. By be-
coming infrastructural in many communicative processes, social media
platforms enable citizens and businesses to communicate with each other
in all kinds of flexible and new ways. But they also shape a proprietary
logistical and political space beyond the control of nation states or public
scrutiny. There is a glacial dimension of this change, where platforms
become infrastructures through their ability to gradually change how
practices of communication are imagined and performed today. I want to
discuss this change as a form of abrasion, the gradual grinding away at
the conditions in which public articulation and contestation take place,
a process in which value orientations and infrastructural choices collide.
Looking back at the period between 2001 and the present, it is as-
tounding how much social media have become embedded in everyday
practices of individuals, institutions, politics, and the economy at large.
There is now a generation of people coming into adulthood whose use of
social media platforms shapes their understanding of relating to society
in general. This development may be individually motivated, but it has
collective effects of scale: “The choices of individuals by themselves are
unlikely to have much of an impact. But networked technologies serve
to aggregate and amplify individual decisions” (Hermida 4). In light of
this amplification and growing popularity, there are also increasing po-
litical and cultural contestations over social media, because they serve
as infrastructures of public articulation without being subject to public
governance. The dominant data-driven business model of Silicon Valley
entrepreneurs relies on integrated platforms for social interaction in order
to micro-target and capture attention for advertising with unprecedented
analytic and predictive capabilities (Seaver; Fisher and Mehozay).
The data that users generate is used by social media platforms to train
algorithms, to predict and steer attention and behavior. Due to the high
potential of abusing this power, social media are increasingly a target of
regulators—both in the U.S. and in Europe. The demand that “coopera-
tive responsibility” (Helberger, Pierson, and Poell) needs to govern social
media platforms is getting louder. They are perceived to be global infra-
structures under corporate governance without functioning as “media of
integration,” as van Laak described the historical origin of the concept
of infrastructures in relation to train networks (“Infra-Strukturgeschich-
te” 370). From the perspective of the platform society, the big players
in the market are, apart from their equally large Chinese counterparts,
clustering around sets of integrated services and resources that reinvent
the open Internet as a corporate product for connectivity, merging and
disrupting existing social and political frameworks at a faster rate than
regulation can keep apace (van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal).
Many current developments—such as increasing political polariza-
tion, fake news, and the amplification of fringe opinions—expose how
118 Amst 66.1 (2021): 117-22Disruption and Abrasion: American Social Media as Contested Infrastructures
the disruption of social media and messenger services challenges es-
tablished institutional frameworks of how public opinion is formulated.
There is an “infrastructural uncanny” (Gray, Bounegru, and Venturini)
lingering in the designs of data analysis and processing, of interfaces
and the pervasive individualization of news and entertainment reper-
toires available to many audiences around the world. The perspective of
infrastructure focuses on this lateral and invisible dimension of resource
provision, the taken-for-grantedness of everyday media, precisely in the
sense that “infrastructures are first-rate means to execute politics” (van
Laak, “Technological” 55).
In the case of social media, these means include both a monopoliza-
tion of the interfaces and gateways of public connection, as well as the
manifest built networks of transatlantic cables and “dark fiber” embed-
ded in urban fabrics (Halegoua and Lingel). In the wake of Western
modernity, content creation and distribution came to be dissociated and
relegated to separate institutions. The net neutrality principle upholds
this by not prioritizing particular data packets sent over the Internet.
Now we see social media as environments of content creation, commu-
nication, and interaction, which build their own material infrastructures
beyond data centers. In 2016, Facebook teamed up with Microsoft and
Telefonica to lay a high-capacity Internet cable from Virginia Beach,
VA, to Bilbao, Spain, allowing the consortium to prioritize their own
traffic and to maintain full control over a gateway that serves hundreds
of millions of users (Metz).
The disruption caused by the “platformization of infrastructures”
(Plantin et al. 295) points towards a new understanding of what the In-
ternet is. Conventionally, the story of the Internet is still told from the
perspective of a military technology becoming used in research institu-
tions and later civic contexts: starting with technical agreements around
parameters of protocols and network architecture of the ARPANET,
and ending with cloud computing and global connectivity (van Sche-
wick; Abbate; Hu). This is foremost an American tale of technologi-
cal innovation, intimately tied to particular political and geographical
conditions that are likewise tied to the designs of American, and later
global, information networks (Starosielski; John). But there is another
angle to the story of the Internet as a space of information and commu-
nication, based on Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal for “MESH” at the Eu-
ropean Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva in the
1980s. Back in 1988, in his work at CERN, Berners-Lee was confronted
with a host of different systems for computing, filing, and archiving,
which all lacked a common metalanguage with which they could con-
nect. Instead of inventing a new system for all of their users, Berners-
Lee came up with a basic set of standards which applied across a range
of systems. As he summarized his idea: “I would have to create a system
with common rules that would be acceptable to everyone. This meant as
close as possible to no rules at all” (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 15). The
Amst 66.1 (2021): 117-22 119 Christoph Raetzsch
initial proposal led to design principles for hypertext markup of websites
(the common “hypertext transfer protocol” or HTTP), and ultimately
helped build the World Wide Web and instate the international World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as its governing body. What was ini-
tially only a solution to a fairly specialized problem of information man-
agement ultimately became a building block for a global communication
infrastructure. As it stands, these two versions of the Internet (counting
out the Chinese third path) stand as two political choices about how
infrastructures serve the common good, how they can be “media of in-
tegration” for the whole of society.
In 2017, Mark Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to “develop the social
infrastructure […] to build a global community that works for all of us.”
Certainly, Facebook and other platforms contribute to a form of global
community that emerges from enhanced networking and everyday con-
nectivity. Yet, it is a community for which platforms set the terms of ser-
vice and where the specific business model empowers actors quite dif-
ferently—with both beneficial and disastrous effects for societies. The
debates about fake news have amply shown that there is an infrastruc-
tural dimension to political polarization, which rests on the optimization
of content delivery, analyzing user behavior, and collective incentives for
undemocratic purposes (George; Benkler, Faris, and Roberts). With ev-
ery click and like, an abrasive force grinds at those institutions through
which the formation of public will has, with its own inequities and short-
comings, until now been organized and structured. How democratic val-
ues can or should be embedded in technological designs is an emerging
subject for debate (Helberger; Pickard, “Restructuring”). For different
reasons there is now a realization on both sides of the Atlantic that pub-
lic articulation is in need of infrastructures that have models of public
governance embedded in, rather than added to, them. The rationale of
public service broadcasting in many European societies is, however, an-
tagonistic to the market-driven rationale of entertainment and the media
that is typical of the United States: “In its paltry support of public media,
the United States is in a league of its own,” writes Victor Pickard, “an
outlier among democracies, providing a case study by which scholars can
observe the effects of largely unmitigated commercial pressures on jour-
nalistic practices” (Democracy 137).
In a search for a common ground, transatlantic perspectives on how
to address the fallout of digital innovation on public discourse will nec-
essarily differ. As Ulrich Beck once wrote, “[t]he continuance of an in-
stitution is based on its social recognition as a permanent solution to a
permanent problem” (57). The problem of having to enable public dis-
course may be seen as permanent in individualized societies. How this is
organized is in no way necessarily tied to any particular institution, like
the press or the electoral process, alone. The strong political support for
public media in Europe may serve as an inoculation against a too-quick
disintegration of common sense here. But it is also time to come up with
120 Amst 66.1 (2021): 117-22Disruption and Abrasion: American Social Media as Contested Infrastructures
alternatives to the detrimental effects of “citizen journalism” gone rogue
through the networked affordances of social media platforms. Other-
wise, the abrasive work of algorithmically optimized divisiveness will
grind away at the grounds on which European democracies can renew
themselves.
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