Protocols and Platforms: Historicizing the Ideologies of Social Media

Social media has become one of the dominant spaces for a large variety of discourses. By drawing public debate to just a few large platforms owned by multinational corporations mostly based in the United States, it has built a centralized layer controlled by the specific needs of these corporations on top of the distributed infrastructure of the internet. This paper explores the underlying precepts and ideologies of the internet generally, and social media companies in particular. It investigates suggestions to return to an internet of protocols rather than platforms and explicates that this proposition is too simplistic to be adopted as general policy. The paper historicizes how the way we speak about the internet was shaped in large part by ideas emerging out of a U.S. Cold War/countercultural context and argues that this mode still underlies seemingly neutral discourses surrounding the internet and its conceptions of freedom and free speech.