Platform Membership and Digital Society

Sociological accounts of the digital society highlight the role of networks, data, and algorithms. While all these aspects of digitalization are important, I argue that they miss a crucial development in the digital transformation of society: the generalization of membership through platforms. Of course, platform organizations are harvesting user data for profit and are thus contributing to datafication and digital surveillance. But they also provide the infrastructure for digital social spaces for action. Within these spaces, users are not meeting as free and unconstrained actors whose interactions are developing the fundamental rules of digital conduct. They are meeting as members whose interactions are coordinated by the platforms.

By becoming a platform user, people acknowledge the terms of services and community guidelines of platforms. Terms and guidelines are specifying the rules for conduct whose observance is subject to peer control and content moderation. Breaking the rules may be sanctioned by restricting the distribution of user content – either by simply deleting it or through shadow banning – or by excluding the user from the platform. Platforms are thus textbook examples for using membership (as conceptualized by Barnard, Simon or Luhmann) as a coordination device.

The contribution discusses digital membership in platforms. It reconstructs the nature of digital membership by comparing membership in platforms with analog forms of membership in organizations, groups, and families. In addition, it investigates into the consequences of digital membership for society at large. By generalizing membership through platforms that are operating on a global scale, digitalization might contribute to the development of a world “society of organizations” (Perrow).