“Knowledge of what? Knowledge for whom?” This question, raised in Karen Gregory’s lecture on a public sociology of algorithms and AI, became a guiding thread throughout the Walking Through the Platform Winter School, held in Naples (Italy), from 26 to 28 November. It invited us, as researchers, to interrogate our methodological tools and the politics of knowledge production embedded in digital platforms. Over three days, the Southern Centre for Digital Transformation at the University of Naples Federico II became a laboratory where scholars, Ph.D. students, and researchers experimented with ways of studying platforms “from the inside out.”

The Winter School’s proposal framed this ambition clearly: to move beyond dichotomies that continue to shape mainstream digital research—material/immaterial, human/non-human, autonomy/automation—and instead situate platforms as ambivalent technopolitical ecologies requiring methodological inventiveness and collective imagination. That ethos framed our activities, from theoretical seminars to hands-on walkthroughs and art-based presentations, encouraging us, as early-career researchers, to step outside habitual modes of academic knowledge production and embrace a more experimental, embodied, and speculative inquiry.

The opening day set the conceptual foundations. Pieter Vanden Broeck’s lecture, “Beyond Extraction: Algorithmic Management and the Inflation of Expectations”, examined how digital platforms participate in—and accelerate—societal processes of expectation inflation, shifting organizational topologies, and extending algorithmic management. His distinction between bureaucratic, post-bureaucratic, and synthetic modes of organization showed how contemporary platforms operate according to logics that no longer rely on hierarchy but on horizontal, immediate, and “twisted” forms of accountability.

Later that afternoon, Karen Gregory’s seminar reframed algorithmic systems through the lens of lived experience, labor, and public sociology. In her discussion, Karen Gregory emphasized that asking “knowledge of what, knowledge for whom?” requires researchers to center platform workers’ epistemic authority, drawing on traditions of workers’ inquiry that reposition workers not as merely sources of data but as co-creators who contribute to the research agendas, interpretive frameworks, and policy recommendations as an output of that knowledge.

The second day centered on methodological experimentation. Paolo Landri and Fabio Esposito introduced the walkthrough method, drawing on Light, Burgess, and Duguay’s (2018) foundational framework. Their version emphasized ethnographic attention and systematic documentation of interface features, flows, and embedded visions of use. We were encouraged to “make the familiar strange,” treating platforms as cultural artefacts that configure ideal users, scripts of action, and normative visions of sociality.

In the hands-on workshop, my group selected WhatsApp as our object of inquiry. We mapped its symbolic representations, interface composition, affective cues, and functions—producing a collective cartography of stickers, notifications, emojis, FOMO triggers, hyper-connectivity, presence indicators, and governance mechanisms like status, groups, muting, and archival structures. This exercise made visible the platform’s subtle choreography of intimacy, visibility, and attention.

With the Taller Estampa Collective and Roc Albalat’s art-based facilitation, we learned about platform affective cartographies, shifting from critique to creative speculation. In the last day, expanding on that and through collaborative drawing, prototyping, and reflection, we experimented with how platforms might cultivate different affective relations, modes of governance, etc. The concluding exhibition of group outputs captured the spirit of the Winter School: not merely analyzing platforms, but actively rethinking how we inhabit them, how they shape us, and how they might be otherwise.

Note: ChatGPT 5.1 was used to structure the content and revise the grammar in this text.