Governance on, with, behind, and beyond the Discord platform: a study of platform practices in an informal learning context

Abstract

ABSTRACT Emerging scholarship has brought critical attention to the increasing influence of digital platform architectures on learning across disciplines and contexts. Allied with such scholarship, this study examines how the logics of social media platforms create the conditions for new formations of literacy to emerge at the intersection of digital capitalism and literacy expression. Examining data collected at the Giga-Games Camp (pseudonym), a series of video game design summer camps for adolescents, the author leverages topological methodology to show how Giga-Gamers’ literacy engagements with Discord, a social media platform popular among gamers, were articulated as the platform practice of governance. The author argues that unraveling the processes by which literacy is platformized within digital media ecologies can help educational researchers and practitioners better attend to the social, political, and economic substrates shaping learning and literacy in the platform era.