This by Tarleton Gillespie in Custodians of the Internet perfectly captures what I mean by platform and agency. It cuts through descriptive and explanatory work on platforms but is rarely ever analysed in a thorough and multifaceted way:
On the other hand, it is also easy to overstate the influence platforms have as straightforward and muscular—either facilitating participation in powerful ways or constraining and exploiting it in powerful ways. Users don’t simply walk the paths laid out by social media platforms. They push against them, swarm over them, commandeer them, and imbue them with new meanings.
Loc 478
I increasingly feel there is failure to recognise this in analysis of platforms within digital education, reproducing the most deterministic strand of platform studies without recognising the much more agency-sensitive strand to that literature.
Mark Carrigan 