Discoverability: Toward a Definition of Content Discovery Through Platforms

Discoverability is a concept of growing use in digital cultural policy, but it lacks a clear and comprehensive definition. Typically, discoverability is narrowly defined as a problem for content creators to find an audience given an abundance of choice. This view misses the important ways that apps, online stores, streaming services, and other platforms coordinate the experiences of content discovery. In this article, we propose an analytical framework for studying the dynamic and personalized processes of content discovery on platforms. Discoverability is a kind of media power constituted by content discovery platforms that coordinate users, content creators, and software to make content more or less engaging. Our framework highlights three dimensions of this process: the design and management of choice in platform interfaces (surrounds), the pathways users take to find content and the effects those choices have (vectors), and the resulting experiences these elements produce. Attention to these elements, we argue, can help researchers grapple with the challenging mutability and individualization of experience on content discovery platforms as well as provide a productive new way to consider content discovery as a matter of platform governance.