Platforms and everyday life: A triply articulated approach to domesticating digital media

Platforms and Everyday Life explores how people interact with hardware and digital media platforms in everyday life. By integrating the concept of triple articulation (object, text, and context) into the domestication framework (Silverstone et al., 1992; Silverstone, 1994), I propose an articulated moral economy to explore the interplay between households, platforms, and everyday life. Using digital ethnography, the study highlights how 50 households (a total of 151 participants between the ages of zero to 73) use hardware platforms (i.e., mobile devices, gaming consoles) and digital media platforms (i.e., social media, gaming, content streaming) in everyday life. The data was collected between August 2021 and November 2022 using a set of mixed methods entailing a household survey, semi-structured interviews (individual and household), a home tour, and a one-day media audit for every participant. The study highlights the platformized (the increasing position of platforms as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the web), datafied, gendered, racialized, cultured, and class-based dimensions of everyday life, and the imbrication between households and platforms, both of which function as moral and economic systems.