TRANSIENT-PLATFORM PARADIGMS: NARRATIVES OF BLOCKCHAIN EXPERIMENTS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

Abstract

This paper develops the concept of transient-platform paradigm by closely examining a blockchain technology experiment for a social media platform. To do so, this paper presents partial findings from the platform biography (doctoral thesis) (Burgess & Baym, 2020) of one such BSM, DTube. DTube aspired to provide a fair and transparent alternative creator economy built without the foundations of an advertising revenue model (unlike YouTube). It relied on the critical affordance tokenization or cryptocurrency to overcome the economic challenges. The research was conducted in three phases and followed various ethnographic methods. This research is motivated to articulate the emergent "structures of feeling" or the "social experience which is still in process" (Williams, 1977, p. 132). It aims to comprehend the imaginaries of a future Internet / Web that experiments like DTube are trying to articulate. DTube represented an emergent system since it introduced "new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships" (p. 123) in a social media system. The discourse of rewarding social interactions was a definitive characteristic in this emergent culture's new meanings and practices. In the process, it shaped a new paradigm that this paper calls a 'transient-platform paradigm', where dispersed initiatives attempt to recreate social media platforms for users by the users.