[Commlist] Call for Papers: Internet Histories Special Issue on Dead and Dying Platforms

Muira McCammon and Jessa Lingel at the University of Pennsylvania's 
Annenberg School for Communication are seeking abstracts for a 
forthcoming co-edited special issue with /Internet Histories. /Details 
are below. Please note that if authors' abstracts are accepted and if 
their papers make it through the peer review process, no payment will be 
expected; there are no Article Processing Charges (APCs) associated with 
this special issue.

What follows is a summary of the call, which can also be found at the 
following link:

https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/dead-and-dying-platforms/



Dead and Dying Platforms: The Poetics, Politics, and Perils of Internet 
History

Muira McCammon & Jessa Lingel (University of Pennsylvania)

Rationale & Motivation

This special issue explores internet histories through the lens of 
“platform death” as a way of understanding how digital communities 
grapple with absence, invisibility, and disappearance. Collectively, the 
contributions in this issue will address the cultural, geopolitical, 
economic, and socio-legal repercussions of what happens when various 
corners of the Internet fail, decline, or expire. As a point of 
departure, we assume that platforms can bring together a wide set of 
actors, from politicians to parents, teens to technologists, spies to 
free speech activists; they can serve as a stage where people gather, 
argue, develop personal relationships, and jockey for divergent futures 
(Marvin, 1988; Pearce, 2011; Baym, 2015; Lee, 2017; Gillepsie, 2018). 
But what becomes of platforms when they fade, fail, or fall from public 
favor? What can dead and dying platforms tell us about the internet’s 
growth and stagnation, its present and futures? We seek to complicate, 
document, and build on the narratives of platform change, collapse, 
death, precarity, and frailty that scholars (Gehl, 2012; Chun, 2016; 
Belleflamme & Neysen, 2017; Gomez-Meijia, 2018; Helmond & van der Vlist, 
2019) and tech journalists (Kircher, 2016) have highlighted over the 
past two decades.


Recent scholarship has focused on the rise and resilience of certain 
tech enterprises, such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter (e.g. Burgess & 
Green, 2009; Vaidhyanathan, 2018; Jackson, Bailey, & Foucault Welles, 
2020), but much of this research has privileged big platforms over the 
small, surviving digital communities over the dead, and Silicon 
Valley-born-and-bred design thinking over that birthed outside tech hot 
spots. Studies imagining the demise of Big Tech platforms (Ohman & 
Aggarwal, 2019) and tracing consumer resistance to digital media (Katz & 
Aspden, 1998; Portwood-Stacer, 2013) have largely ignored both the 
values and frailties of Small Tech in great depth. While historical and 
contemporary research has addressed the themes of digital departure 
(Wyatt, 1999; Baumer et al., 2013), disappearing mediums (Gehl, 2012; 
Suominen et al., 2013; Ballatore & Natale, 2016), and user mortality 
(Leaver, 2013), it has largely left the theme of “platform death” to the 
wayside. Another key absence in this literature is attention to 
platforms and communities outside the U.S. and Europe.


With the above gaps in the literature in mind, the impetus for this 
special issue came from a forthcoming panel in the Communication History 
Division at the May 2020 International Communication Association’s 
Annual Conference, “Dead and Dying Platforms: The Poetics, Politics, 
and Perils of Internet History.” When organizing the panel, over 20 
different scholars in six countries writing on the histories of 
specific, bounded platforms expressed interest. Though not all could be 
included in the final panel, many articulated a desire to contribute to 
a special issue, such as this one, focusing on the promises and perils 
of single platforms through the lens of Internet history. This special 
issue seeks to bring together diverse thinkers and scholars with 
expertise in a range of dead and dying platforms.

Description of CFP Procedure

**

We aim to bring together contributors active in the fields of history, 
communication, media studies, law, economics, psychology, internet 
studies, library and information science, queer theory, journalism 
studies, and related scholarly domains. The topic of contributions may 
include, but are not limited to:

  * The rise and fall of specific platforms, including discussions on
    the challenges, factors, and policies responsible for their decline
    – and rebirth.
  * Archival techniques and theoretical frameworks for resurrecting and
    reimagining dead platforms
  * Comparative investigations of platform precarity
  * Explorations of the laws, economic forces, and social trends that
    underlie the historical analysis of platforms that have survived to
    the present day
  * Memory narratives and counter-narratives of platform users,
    designers, and advertisers
  * Media refusal, disconnection and techno-skepticism
  * The offline repercussions and cultural reverberations of platform death
  * Rhetorics and metaphors of the describe platform death and failures
    of platform governance (i.e. kill switches)
  * The ethnographies, pre-histories, and afterlives of dying digital
    communities
  * Quantitative and qualitative methodologies that can operationalize
    platform collapse
  * Interconnections between the frailties of Small Tech and the
    failures of Big Tech
  * Ways in which the rise and fall of certain platforms are
    geographically asymmetrical and asynchronous
  * Media change, materiality, everyday experience, and nostalgia
  * The ontological and epistemological challenges of considering
    platforms as dead, dying, or alive
  * Historiographies of platforms created, used, and/or dismantled
    outside the United States
  * Studies of platforms whose deaths have not received significant
    Anglophone press coverage
  * Analysis of the implications of platform death for international and
    global discussions of Internet pasts and futures

Although papers do need to be written in English, we especially welcome 
writing that explores platforms whose histories are rooted in 
understudied countries, areas, cultures, and digital communities. We 
particularly encourage submissions about platforms launched, used and/or 
remembered outside of Silicon Valley.

Submissions & Time Schedule

**

Abstracts (500 words maximum) should be emailed to 
(deadplatforms /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(deadplatforms /at/ gmail.com)> by September 1, 
2020. Any questions about the CFP can be sent to the co-editors, Muira 
McCammon ((muira.mccammon /at/ asc.upenn.edu) 
<mailto:(muira.mccammon /at/ asc.upenn.edu)>) and Jessa Lingel 
((jessa.lingel /at/ asc.upenn.edu) 
<mailto:(jessa.lingel /at/ asc.upenn.edu)>).  Notification about acceptance to 
submit an article will be sent out by 1 October 2020.  Authors of 
accepted abstracts are invited to submit an article by 1 February 2021. 
Final versions or articles are asked to keep within a 6,000 word limit. 
Please note that acceptance of abstract does not ensure final 
publication as all articles must go through the journal’s usual peer 
review process.

— 1 Sep 2020: due date for abstracts

— 1 Oct 2020: notification of acceptance

— 1 Feb 2021: accepted articles to be submitted for review

— Feb 2021-May 2021: review process and revisions


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