defining platforms—and religion as platforms

I subscribe to the “Religion Watch” newsletter out of Baylor University but usually don’t do much more than skim it. The first entry in the June edition, though, immediately stood out to me for this excerpt:

Paul Seabright’s recent book, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People (Princeton University Press, $35), is unique for its comprehensive treatment of the religious past and present as well as its novel use of the concept of “platforms” in explaining the economy of religion.

As someone who studies religion on platforms, I was immediately intrigued by this idea of studying religion as platforms. I was lucky enough to be able to download the book through my institutional library, and I’ve been slowly making my way through it since. “Slowly” because I have a number of pressing deadlines—including the beginning of the semester next Monday—and as intrigued as I am with this idea, I really don’t have the research bandwidth right now to do something with this. However, I’ve read enough of Seabright’s book to have some initial thoughts on how he uses platform as a conceptual framework, and I’d like to write them down in case I have time to do something more substantive a few months from now.

Seabright on “platforms”

To be honest, I find Seabright’s understanding of platforms… disappointing. Now, as far as I’m concerned, theory is more rhetorical than ontological. That is—and to paraphrase Étienne Wenger—theory is useful for drawing the researcher’s attention to certain aspects of a phenomenon. I’m not interested in arguing about the necessary or sufficient features of “a platform,” and I’m not sure that one could do so even if one believed it was a useful exercise. I also concede that while I am an internet researcher, Seabright is an economist, and I am ill-suited for evaluating whether Seabright’s understanding of platforms draws the right kind of attention to the right aspects of religion from an economist’s point of view.

As that internet researcher, though, I’m not sure that Seabright really captures what makes platforms interesting, and I can’t see myself using his understanding of platforms to study religion. In fact, his repeated insistence that scholars’ focus on digital platforms distracts us from other manifestations of platforms, while interesting, also suggests to me an overly broad understanding of what platforms are. Here’s an early explanation, from p. 10 of his book:

Platforms are organizations that facilitate relationships that could not form, or could not function as effectively, in the platforms’ absence.

This is a fine definition, and if it draws attention to what Seabright is interested in, I think that’s theoretically sound enough for his purposes.

what makes digital platforms interesting

However, I don’t know that Seabright’s definition is sufficient to support an argument like this one, from p. 95:

Digital platforms such as Google, Twitter, and Instagram have become an ever-present feature of our online lives in recent years, to the point where we can exaggerate their novelty and overlook how important non-digital platforms have been for us in the past.

Just earlier this week, I was arguing for an expansive understanding of the term technology, one that helps us not exaggerate novelty, so I have a certain sympathy for this argument. Yet, as Tarleton Gillespie argues in his 2010 article The Politics of ‘Platforms’:

The point is not so much the word itself; ‘platform’ merely helps reveal the position that these intermediaries are trying to establish and the difficulty of doing so. YouTube must present its service not only to its users, but to advertisers, to major media producers it hopes to have as partners and to policymakers. The term ‘platform’ helps reveal how YouTube and others stage themselves for these constituencies, allowing them to make a broadly progressive sales pitch while also eliding the tensions inherent in their service: between user-generated and commercially-produced content, between cultivating community and serving up advertising, between intervening in the delivery of content and remaining neutral.

In short, “facilitate relationships” seems to me too timid a phrase to use to describe platforms, when digital platforms, as Gillespie suggests, invoke the phrase to suggest a neutrality despite the heavier hand that they actually play.

another example of a platform

Another thing I posted earlier this week was a link to an excellent (if depressing) 404 Media article about the Tea platform. I highly recommend the article, but let me give the briefest of summaries to illustrate what I think Seabright’s definition captures and what I think it misses.

Tea is a platform inspired by the ecosystem of “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” Facebook groups, which allow women to trade notes on men they’ve met through dating apps. So far, Seabright’s definition holds up: The point of Tea is to facilitate relationships between women so that they can share important information. Since other platforms facilitate other human behaviors besides relationships, let’s tweak Seabright’s phrase to facilitate human behavior.

Here’s where the Tea story gets wild, though. Tea was inspired by the “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” Facebook groups, but when the founder of those groups didn’t show any interest in joining the app team, Tea went to great lengths to infiltrate those groups, create deliberately similar alternative groups, and to badmouth those groups. So, Tea isn’t just interested in facilitating human behavior—it’s also interested in defining human behavior by shaping its boundaries and expressions. (In her The Culture of Connectivity, José van Dijck also provides a great example of how Facebook’s “Like” button defines—at least in that context—what it means to “like” something.)

And, of course, Tea is a Silicon Valley startup, so it’s trying to monetize its purportedly noble mission of protecting women in their dating experiences. Seabright is attentive to religion’s relationship with money—the subtitle of the book is “How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People”—so it’s surprising to me that this isn’t built more explicitly into the platform model that he’s adopting. Let’s go ahead, though, and add profiting from human behavior as a third defining feature of a platform.

Now, this is some off-the-cuff thinking that mostly happened while driving back from kiddo’s soccer practice, so I’m not going to carve these three “platform attributes” into stone. I’d like to go back into the literature before setting up any definition of platform as a useful framework. Also, like any framework, there are some examples that fit better than others. Mastodon, for example, probably ought to count as a platform, but it’s hard to see how it “profits from human behavior” in the same way that Tea does.

applying this understanding to religion

Despite those caveats, though, I think this understanding of a platform as something that facilitates, defines, and profits from human behavior is much more compelling than the understanding that Seabright offers. What’s more, if the purpose of theory is to draw researchers’ attention to the most salient aspects of a phenomenon, this three-pronged approach strikes me as interesting for how it could draw attention to certain aspects of religion.

Let’s take the example of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, since most of my religion research is related to Mormonism. Selecting “seeking salvation” as our human behavior—and setting aside the reality of any salvation-oriented cosmology for the purposes of this exercise—we could productively ask ourselves:

• how does this church facilitate seeking salvation? (by providing access to certain sacraments and offering certain teachings)
• how does this church define seeking salvation? (by adding necessary sacraments not found in other Christian faiths and adding a communal family element to salvation)
• how does this church profit from seeking salvation? ( …even as a no-longer-practicing Latter-day Saint, I admit to finding this question a bit uncomfortable… and yet, there’s no denying that this is a very, very rich church)

As an internet researcher, I would be further interested in asking how these platform logics might influence the way that Latter-day Saint institutions employ, avoid, or emphasize other technological platforms.

conclusion

This is a lot of spitballing, and I really ought to be getting to bed, so spitballing it will stay. I think Seabright is onto something by considering religions as platforms, but I don’t think he offers the right understanding of “platforms” for that kind of consideration to be useful to me and my work. That said, if this spitballing has accomplished one thing, I hope it’s to demonstrate that there are interesting characteristics of platforms—and that a more developed understanding of those characteristics could lend itself productively to research involving religion.

• platforms
• religion
• Paul Seabright
• The Divine Economy
• theory
• Tea (app)
• Mastodon
• Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints