TO SEE AND BE SEEN: THE POLITICS OF PLATFORM DESIGN AND THE FORMATION OF IDENTITY OF LGBTQ YOUTH IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

Platform studies aim to elucidate how new media platforms may operate while needing to pander to various stakeholders at the same time. Extant platform scholarship, however, has largely examined the platform in isolation of its users or vice versa. This thesis aims to reconcile this gap in literature through a queer approach that inquiries into both a platform's interfacial design as well as the cultural problematics of their users in order to examine how the politics of platforms materialises in their design, and how such politics ultimately intertwine with social practices of platform users. This materialisation may be most salient when examining how LGBTQ youth in Singapore use new media platforms for identity formation, given that such sites and applications provide the most accessible ways for queer youth to construct their sexual and/or gender identities in the face of a predominantly heterosexist and cisnormative climate. Semistructured in-depth interviews with 20 LGBTQ-identifying youth between the ages of 18 to 24 were conducted, alongside a short-term focused virtual ethnography in the platforms that they identified during their interviews. In analysing the collected data, Brock's (2018) Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis was used together with Stanfill's (2015) Discursive Interface Analysis in order to identify how platform interfaces have constructed certain normativities that configure their user, and how their users have acted in light of such norms. Juxtaposed against the economies of the identified platforms, I argue that a platform's design facilitates how gaze is conducted (Sturken & Cartwright, 2001), which in turn requires queer users to navigate through such gaze affixations.