Global Digital Cultures

16• global digital cultures their uses, their maintenance, and their influence, however, are united in their focus on practices by various actors, indexing dynamic webs of historical, cultural, political, socio-technical, and commercial concerns.If, following Uricchio (2003), we approach media as cultural practices that envelop technologies, texts, and institutions, then the questions about public values and social good in the age of Google and Facebook must be framed in relation to the affordances of networked media platforms and what states, corporations, and users actually do with them.Further, recentering enduring concerns like localization in computational platforms reveals the tensions between the "global" and the "local," and how these tensions continue to be negotiated by policy makers, industry actors, and users across the world on a day-to-day basis.As we contend with platforms moving from one cultural and industrial context to another, Gillespie's (2010) approach to understanding platforms as being composed of four interlinked semantic categories-architectural, computational, figurative, and political-is useful to understanding technological considerations and processes of localization.In this regard, our understanding of localization, hybridity, and the circulation of formats in relation to film and television is a helpful basis (Kraidy 2005; Kumar 2005; Shahaf 2014; Waisbord 2004).Scholarship on MTV's hybrid avatars across the world has shown that localization is a far more complex process involving cultural translations and exchanges that can at times be politically fraught (Fung 2006;Cullity 2002).These accounts also foreground how localization is a multiscalar process whereby shifts in industrial and managerial logics (for instance, producing content locally) go hand in hand with highly charged representational moves that build on and often challenge dominant norms, values, and aspirations in relation to class, caste, gender, and sexuality (Kumar and Curtin 2002;Mankekar 2004).Thinking about localization would allow us to understand, for instance, the cultural shifts that Tinder as a "dating" app needs to straddle in the Indian market (see Das, this volume) or how Facebook becomes shorthand for the Internet at large in Myanmar (see Arnaudo, this volume).Indeed, when assessed in relation to this longer media and cultural history, it is evident that platform localization cannot be merely about local language implementation, subtitling, or technological tweaks that respond to concerns like data speeds and cost.YouTube's trajectory in Pakistan-from its entry as a global platform in 2006, its censorship and outright ban in 2008, the protracted civil society struggle, and, finally, the lifting of the ban after the launch of a local version