Netflix Nations. Ramon Lobato
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time. There is no scheduled flow of programming (even though much of the licensed content offered on SVOD services was produced for such a schedule); there are only individual pieces of content within a database of offerings that can be consumed in any order, at any time, and that will often continue to play automatically thanks to the Netflix Post-Play feature (which automatically cues the next episode). Depending on how we evaluate such structural changes in distribution, this aspect of internet television may indeed embody the same inside-out quality that Elsaesser and Hagener identify in digital cinema production.
As we can see from these various arguments, there are benefits and risks to seeing Netflix through the lens of television. Such a perspective opens our eyes to important continuities in the experience, production norms, and domestic context of moving-image entertainment, but it can also produce some analytical traps. This is why it is helpful to take a both/and approach, so we can approach our object from multiple perspectives simultaneously. As we have seen, Netflix may still feel like TV to viewers, and it relies on this familiar pleasure for its success, but its distributional logic is markedly different—technologically, economically, and structurally. It is too early to tell, of course, but we should at least entertain the possibility that the affordance of internet protocol distribution may well prove to be the parasite inside the host—the agent of change that ends up quietly overtaking the organism from the inside out—while still retaining its outward features.
Digital Media Studies and the Platform Perspective
Let us consider a second analytical approach and what it might bring to an understanding of Netflix. This second approach would consider Netflix as a digital media service—a computational, software-based system that can produce a television-like experience as just one of its potential applications. Following this line of thought—which in fact aligns with the historical origins of the company and the way it presents itself to investors and regulators, if not to users—we can start to see how Netflix fits in with a quite different set of debates that have been playing out in fields such as new media studies, internet studies, and platform studies. In this section, I explore some of the arguments relevant to Netflix that have emerged from these debates. This will push our analysis of Netflix in a direction different from where television studies might take us.
This second way of thinking is less concerned with understanding Netflix in relation to television, cinema, or any other form of screen media, however one defines it. In contrast, it sees Netflix as a complex sociotechnical software system. It is more interested in looking sideways to other digital media, rather than backward to television, to assess similarities and differences. There is, then, a fundamental difference between a television studies approach and a digital media approach. The former is inherently historicizing; it sees its object in relation to a particular media technology (television) and its evolution. In contrast, the latter implicitly frames its object as a set of computational technologies tied together into a common user interface while also understanding each digital media service as a kind of communication system in its own right—with unique design, affordances, and limitations. This allows us to think about Netflix alongside a much wider range of digital media, including not only video platforms (YouTube, Youku, Hulu) but also e-commerce and social media networks (Facebook, Twitter, Ebay, Amazon, Weibo) as well as other software artifacts, such as electronic program guides (EPGs), gaming consoles, or desktop operating systems.
The term “platform” requires some explanation. In new media and internet studies, platforms are commonly defined as large-scale online systems premised on user interaction and user-generated content—including Facebook, Twitter, Medium, Snapchat, YouTube, Flickr, Grindr, and others. Platform studies, as it has become known, is a field of critical, empirical, and theoretical research concerned with these new institutions of the internet age and the specific ways in which they have been able to harness user communication and labor. It seeks to understand how platforms mediate and organize our daily interactions, asking what this means for communication practices, economies, and identities. Of course, Netflix is not a platform in the same way as social media services like Facebook or Twitter are. Netflix is not open, social, or collaborative. One cannot upload content to Netflix or design software applications to run within it. In this sense, it is fundamentally different from video sites containing both user-uploaded and professionally managed content (YouTube, Youku, etc.). Unlike these sites, Netflix does not (at this stage) have an advertising business model; nor does it have the character of a multisided marketplace like Amazon or Ebay, which host a more complicated ecology of commercial activity. Netflix is closed, library-like, professional; a portal rather than a platform; a walled garden rather than an open marketplace. This said, we can still learn a lot about Netflix through platform studies perspectives.
Platform studies has evolved along two main lines. The first of these comes out of the work of Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost. In their book Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System and related working papers—which are widely read in games studies, though less so in television studies—Montfort and Bogost outline a specific understanding of platforms and how they can be studied. They define a platform as the “hardware and software framework that supports other programs” (Bogost and Montfort 2009a, 1) and as “a computing system of any sort upon which further computing development can be done” (Bogost and Montfort 2009b, 2). They note that a “platform in its purest form is an abstraction, simply a standard or specification” (Bogost and Montfort 2009a, 1). Consequently, their vision of platform studies involves “investigating the relationships between the hardware and software design of standardized computing systems and the creative works produced on those platforms” (ibid.). Montfort and Bogost insist that researchers pay close attention to the materiality of the platform, including its design, construction, and even wiring, as well as to the platform’s user-facing and symbolic dimensions. Their approach is better suited to gaming systems such as Atari and PlayStation than to online services like YouTube, Steam, or Netflix—though the material dimensions of the latter are also amenable to research and critique, as we will see in Chapter 3.
A second strand of thinking about platforms comes out of critical communications and internet research. The work of Tarleton Gillespie in particular draws our attention to the expanding range of everyday communication and consumption practices that take place within online platforms, especially social media networks. Gillespie defines platforms as “sites and services that host, organize, and circulate users’ shared content” (Gillespie 2017, 254). His essay “The Politics of ‘Platforms’ ” (Gillespie 2010) was an early critique of the way online services such as Facebook and YouTube strategically defined themselves as neutral intermediaries—as technology companies rather than media companies—thus obscuring their power as mediators of communication, identity, and politics.2
A key theme in Gillespie’s work is the agency of the platform itself. Far from being neutral, platforms shape the communications, interactions, and consumption that they facilitate—through interface design, moderation policies, terms of service, algorithmic recommendation, and so on. Consider the Facebook “Like” button and how it subtly institutes a norm of extroverted positivity as the default practice for online communications—there is no “Dislike” or “Don’t Care” button—while at the same time generating valuable commercial data for Facebook by turning “personal data into … public connections” (van Dijck 2013, 49; Gerlitz and Helmond 2013). We should not, then, make the mistake of seeing a platform as a “neutral” distributor of content, because the nature, design, and business model of the platform will always have an effect on what passes through it. Platforms, according to Gillespie,
have precise (and shifting) technical affordances that constrain and guide practice—both in their own design and in their fit with a myriad of infrastructures, including their back-end data systems, the protocols of the Web, and the dictates of mobile providers. They have rules and norms that bless some practices and are used to restrict others. They have myriad international, sometimes conflicting, legal obligations they must enforce. They have commercial aspirations and pressures that drive decisions about how they’re marketed, how they’re updated, and how they’re positioned against their competitors. (Gillespie in Clark et al. 2014, 1447)
Following Gillespie’s arguments, it is possible to see how Netflix—while certainly