The next paper in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is presented by Yeran Kim, Miran Pyun, and Danbi Kim, who begin by introducing the idea of the platform paradox: digital platforms are configured by contradictory logics of freedom versus control, transparency versus surveillance, and efficiency versus fatigue; these are integrated and entangled in user experience, and mean that platforms are experiences as complex, dynamic assemblages.
This demonstrates how technology and society are always intertwined, and digital society especially is a control society where power is open, mobile, and seductive, and not just repressive; user agency here is a process of becoming active and creative. The dynamic interplay of ambivalent and oppositional interactions and power relationships may also be recognised and responded to by users, who in doing so also create new paradoxes; this study examines this through 30 interviews with users in Seoul.
Users recognised paradoxes related to infrastructure: freedom of platform choice, but an obligation to use dominant platforms; function: beneficial for some purposes, but detrimental in other contexts; relationship: abundance of connectivity, but wariness of others; subjectivity: personal presence, but a sense of inauthenticity; and autonomy: spontaneity of action, but awareness of algorithmic surveillance.
Users submit to these platform paradoxes and justify their use by their inextricability from these platforms; postponing of disconnection; equivocation about leaving; dismissal of platform paradoxes; and an emphasis on third-person effects rather than impacts on the self. Users also created their own, new paradoxes: careful navigation of separation by physical distancing, boycotting, and switching off; selective detachment by persistent individuality in their usage practices; self-improvement through transforming harmful platform aspects via self-reflection on platform harms.
This shows that users oscillate between three modes: a cognitive recognition of paradoxes; a logical compromise to accommodate to paradoxes; and a critical engagement with platform paradoxes that creates new paradoxes through novel usage practices. These are resistant minority practices in response to the hegemonic platform majority.
