Digital platforms as entangled infrastructures: Addressing public values and trust in messaging apps

Abstract

Digital platforms have increasingly become accepted and trusted by European citizens as indispensable utilities for social interaction and communication in everyday life. This article aims to analyze how trust in and dependence of these ubiquitous platforms for mediated communication is configured and the kind of consequences this has for user (dis)empowerment and public values. Our analysis builds on insights from the domestication perspective and infrastructure studies. In order to illustrate our conceptual approach, we use the case of messaging apps. We demonstrate how these apps as an essential social infrastructure are entangled with a corporate-computational infrastructure. The entangling of both types of infrastructures leads to a paradox where users feel compelled to appropriate these socially indispensable apps in everyday life, while also making them dependent on their corporate control mechanisms. In order to get out of the paradox and empower users these infrastructures and their data sharing need to be disentangled. For this, we apply the notion of ‘infrastructural inversion’ as a way to surface opaque and hidden properties of the digital platforms. We conclude with a discussion of potential other routes for infrastructural inversion in order to establish data disentanglement that serves public interest values.