Thanks to Sebastián Ansaldo for this generous and thought-provoking review of Platform and Agency, which was released by Routledge last year. Among other things he pushes me to conceptualise the archive more substantively in a challenge I wholeheartedly agree with:
Jesús Martín-Barbero’s (1998) concept of mediation offers a potential productive route for extending this ontological problem. His displacement from the analysis of media to the analysis of mediations was intended precisely to move beyond accounts in which media operate as discrete objects exerting effects upon audiences. Instead, mediation directs attention to historically situated processes through which technological forms, cultural matrices, institutions, social relations, and everyday practices become articulated. From this perspective, the relevant ontological question is not only what causal powers a particular medium, platform, or cultural resource possesses in isolation, but how those powers are actualised, modified, or counteracted within concrete configurations of mediation.
Bringing Martín-Barbero (1998) into dialogue with Carrigan (2026) could therefore enrich the ontology of the archive by helping to specify the intermediate processes through which cultural resources become consequential for particular agents. Such an approach would be compatible with Carrigan’s rejection of technological determinism and voluntarism. The causal powers of platforms and cultural objects remain real, but their consequences depend upon the mediations through which they encounter historically situated subjects with particular concerns, relations, trajectories, and capacities for reflexivity.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42438-026-00728-3
