This thesis applies Foucauldian theory of power to the domain of social media platforms. Social media are examined through Bratton’s concept of stacks – complex, layered technological and infrastructural environments that structure human activity. To make an analysis of power within the technological stacks of social media possible, the thesis develops an original typology of their infrastructural interface design and identifies two types of key infrastructural elements (regalia and statistical accounting) that enable the emergence of new kinds of power relations. Using a genealogical method, it elaborates the concept of infrastructural power, grounded in Foucault’s ideas of microphysics of power and its capillarity. The concept of infrastructural power describes the basic power relations that arise in the user–stack–user relation precisely due to the infrastructural design of social media platforms, thereby constituting a technologically mediated and formal type of power, illustrated through user practices (such as ratio) with concrete examples. In conjunction with the power-knowledge concept, the proposed notion of infrastructural power allows the thesis to build a theory of social-media-specific regimes of truth – formal, infrastructural, and technological processes and modes of legitimating and producing appropriate knowledge – truth (the thread procedure). In doing so, the thesis departs from dominant theories of power and ideology based on sovereign models of power, which prioritise content in analysis and apply Foucault’s theories and concepts to social media in an uncritical manner.
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