September 23, 2024
How is a social media platform closed? What decisions do employees face while sunsetting a platform and creating a new one? What influences these decisions?
Frances Corry, assistant professor in the Department of Information Culture and Data Stewardship, explores this in her new publication in New Media & Society.
This publication addresses how platform closure is produced through the sunsetting of an old version of MySpace, a popular social media platform in the mid-2000s, in 2011 for a newly configured MySpace platform in 2013. Drawing on interviews with former MySpace employees, the publication focused on how staff grappled with user-generated content and user data during this process, the decisions employees faced, and the values and perspectives that shaped what aspects the old platform carried over to the new one.
The publication shows that sunsetting a platform and acts of technological destruction more generally are not arbitrary or neutral processes with fixed outcomes, but rather processes of sociotechnical production that vary in consequential ways.