Clicking to activate the key: unlocking the infrastructural potential of digital platforms through improvised relationships
Lu Xu, Zhuo Chen · Information Communication & Society · 2025
This article introduces the concept of the infrastructural key to examine the contingent and negotiated processes through which digital platforms enact centralized power and activate infrastructural potential. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research on Tour Yunnan – a platform co-developed by the Yunnan provincial government and Tencent to centralize governance and coordinate interactions among the state, market, and tourists – the study traces how infrastructural ambitions unfold amid persistent tensions between centralization and localism. Rather than achieving full data integration, Tour Yunnan generated fragmented virtual mirrors of the social world, sustained by improvised activations of social and technical keys, and negotiated forms of compliance. The infrastructural key captures these relational configurations of actors, data, and technologies that temporarily align to enact centralized governance power. By foregrounding the ongoing mobilization and translation of centralized power through friction, negotiation, and care across scales and among stakeholders, this framework challenges deterministic accounts of data lock-in as straightforward power concentration. As a processual and relational analytical tool, it traces the broader process and mechanism of platform-becoming-infrastructure amid the always transient, contingent, and becoming states of infrastructure beyond the Chinese context.