D B Nieborg
Biographic Data
| ID | 41689 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D B Nieborg |
| GIVEN NAMES | D B |
| FAMILY NAME | Nieborg |
| SIGNATURE | NIEBORG D B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3498-789X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 556 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
The Power of Inevitability
This paper investigates the discursive strategies employed by OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, to position themselves as leading the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Through an examination of 44 texts, including OpenAI's corporate communications, media appearances, and journalistic coverage, this study reveals how OpenAI utilizes socio-political anxieties and Silicon Valley ideals to shape a discourse of inevitability about A…
Mainstreaming Decolonial Perspectives in Media and Communication
Over the past two decades, there have been many calls and efforts to decolonize and de-westernize research in media and communication (Aouragh & Chakravartty 2016; Couldry & Mejias 2019; Ricaurte 2019). While these efforts have generated valuable academic centers, community-driven projects, and South-to-South networks (e.g., CARGC, FemLab, Tierra Comun), the field is still dominated by (implicit) universalist perspectives. Often the Anglo-America…
Platformed Hope
This paper explores how creators in the Nigerian social media video industry navigate precarious labour stemming from the business models of digital platforms, specifically YouTube and Facebook. Following global developments, the economic growth and opportunities of digital platforms are creating career opportunities around the world. This has inspired Nigerian content creators who make short-form video content for millions of domestic and diaspo…
Let’s talk about money, data, and platform-dependent cultural production
This essay investigates the political economy of platform-dependent cultural production, focusing on music streaming, mobile games, and short-form video. While platforms still present themselves as democratizing tools, access to the means of production is decoupled from equitable opportunities for distribution, marketing, and monetization. The essay walks through studies that discuss this dynamic such as researchers counting songs on Spotify play…
Global Perspectives on Platforms and Cultural Production
While digital platforms have reconfigured the institutions and practices of cultural production around the globe, current research is dominated by studies that take as their reference point the Anglo-American world--and, to a lesser extent--China (Cunningham & Craig 2019; Kaye et al. 2021; Poell et al. 2021; Zhao 2019). Aside from totalizing theories of platform imperialism (Jin, 2013), the “rest of the world” has thus received relatively scant a…
Where My Ai Apps At? A Historiographic Approach to Analyzing Platform Tools
The popular short-form video app TikTok is mainly discussed as a discrete app or in relation to its parent company ByteDance. This view neglects how TikTok and other ByteDance apps maintain and advance ByteDance’s highly complex app ecosystem. This paper, therefore, positions ByteDance-owned apps as both apps and “platform tools.” TikTok allows end-users to watch videos, allows creators to make and distribute content, advertisers to endorse produ…
Reciprocal Platform Labour in the Nigerian Social Media Video Industry
This paper explores how content creators in the Nigerian social media video industry navigate the economic, infrastructural, and cultural logics of digital platforms through practices of reciprocal labour. As is the case in many global contexts, the economic formalization of social media platforms, such as YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok, have enabled the emergence of for-profit social media video production in Nigeria. This paper focuses on the un…
TikTok’s tools
Analyzing institutional platform power
This article calls for systematic analysis of the accumulation and exercise of institutional platform power in the digital economy. We examine how the relatively open mobile advertising ecosystem is nevertheless dominated by a handful of platform conglomerates, most prominently Google, Facebook, and Apple. Although extant scholarship acknowledges the concentration of corporate power in digital advertising, as well as its cultural, societal, and e…
Introduction to the special issue on Locating and theorising platform power
Against the backdrop of ongoing public and political debates about the power and regulation of large platform conglomerates, this special issue presents critical, conceptual, and empirical studies that home in on the various modalities of platform power
Global perspectives on platforms and cultural production
Research on platforms and cultural production is dominated by studies that take the Anglo-American world and Northwestern Europe as their main points of reference. Central concepts in the field, consequently, bear the imprint of Western institutions, cultural practices, and ideals. Critically responding to this state of affairs, this opening essay of the special issue on Global Perspectives on Platforms and Cultural Production, consisting of 20 a…
Platforms, Power & Advertising
This paper examines how dominant institutional actors exercise power and control over the digital advertising ecosystem. It pursues this inquiry through a case study on the 2021 introduction of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature—a privacy setting newly integrated in the operating system of iOS mobile devices. Developing this case study, we ask: How do dominant market actors exercise control over the infrastructural layers of the ‘mob…
The Politics and Evolution of Tiktok as Platform Tool
A fast-growing international success, ByteDance’s short video platform TikTok is a relevant case study to examine how digital platforms expand infrastructurally and accumulate power. TikTok has achieved popularity comparable to major players, including Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. It now grapples with balancing the diverse interests of its different user groups, chief among which content creators. We interrogate how TikTok manages this chal…
The Engine Is the Message
On January 18, Microsoft revealed its $68.7 billion deal to acquire videogame publisher Activision Blizzard. The acquisition was pitched as an investment towards “metaverse platforms” that gaming would play a key role in developing. Journalists speculated about the increasing consolidation of the videogame industry and whether blockbuster franchises would be locked into Microsoft’s platforms and subscription services. Commentary on the metaverse …
Locating and Theorizing Platform Power
This panel locates and theorizes platform power through five case studies, focussing on: 1) video sharing platforms, 2) app stores, 3) programmatic advertising networks, 4) labor staffing intermediaries, and 5) cloud computing. Each case study starts with the question: where do relations of dependence take shape on the examined platform(s) and how are these relations organized? Addressing this question, the panelists hypothesize that platform pow…
Mainstreaming and Game Journalism
Why games are still niche and not mainstream, and how journalism can help them gain cultural credibility. Mainstreaming and Game Journalism addresses both the history and current practice of game journalism, along with the roles writers and industry play in conveying that the medium is a “mainstream” form of entertainment. Through interviews with reporters, David B. Nieborg and Maxwell Foxman retrace how the game industry and journalists started …
Analyzing Chinese Platform Power
On super apps and app stores
Aiming to enrich the conceptual vocabulary of platform and app studies, this article provides a critical political economic perspective on the media industry to understand how platform power is operationalized in the app economy. Using the China-based tech conglomerate Tencent as a case study, four mechanisms are discussed: conglomeration, financialization, platformization, and infrastructuralization. These mechanisms show how Tencent leveraged b…
Spaces of Negotiation
This article develops an analytical framework to examine the contingent power relations between news organizations and platforms. Eschewing one-sided, monolithic perspectives on platform dominance, we instead theorize power as relational. From this perspective, we observe important variations in news organizations’ degree of platform in/dependence. Examining these variations, we propose the concept of spaces of negotiation, which refers to the op…
Analyzing Platform Power in the Cultural Industries
Across cultures and contexts, digital platforms like YouTube, TikTok/Douyin, WeChat, and Spotify are fundamentally reshaping both the processes and products of cultural production—from music and news to entertainment and advertising. But, despite considerable attention to the perverse power of algorithms in various spheres of social and economic life, we contend that existing political economic frameworks fail to account for the distinctiveness o…
Engineering culture
This article investigates the ways content producers, marketers, and other promotional stakeholders work to optimize cultural goods and services for platform-dependent production, distribution, and monetization. We are particularly interested in how content creators find novel ways to work within, around, and even against platform politics and policies by manipulating algorithms, business models, and guidelines, or otherwise readying their conten…
Apps of Empire
This article interrogates Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter’s Games of Empire. Since its publication in 2009, the game industry evolved significantly, adding billions of players, dollars, and devices. One of the driving forces of this transformation has been the global diffusion of mobile media. This raises the question: Do mobile platforms and the app stores operated by Apple and Google allow for a radical departure from global hypercapitalism? This …
Spinning is winning
Social casino apps are an emergent genre in the app economy that sits at the intersection of three different industries: casino gambling, freemium mobile games, and social media platforms. This institutional position has implications for the social casino app’s political economy and culture of consumption. We argue that social casino apps are representative of a broader casualization of risk that has taken hold in a platform society. By combining…
"Bringing Your Vision to Life"
In this paper, we introduce the notion of production platforms by exploring the political economy of the real-time animation platform Unity by Unity Technologies. Contributing to the debate on the ‘platformization of cultural production’ by examining the penetration of Unity’s economic, infrastructural, and governance extensions beyond its platform boundaries, we argue Unity has become the de facto default for the development of apps thereby impa…
Platform Power & Public Value
This paper offers an analytical framework to critically examine the power relations that structure the online platform ecosystem. Following a relational understanding of power, it focuses on the connections between the five leading platform corporations - Alphabet-Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) - and the many other digital properties (i.e. platforms, websites, and apps) that populate the online ecosystem. Exploring these c…
The platformization of cultural production
This article explores how the political economy of the cultural industries changes through platformization: the penetration of economic and infrastructural extensions of online platforms into the web, affecting the production, distribution, and circulation of cultural content. It pursues this investigation in critical dialogue with current research in business studies, political economy, and software studies. Focusing on the production of news an…
Wikinomics and its discontents
Collaborative culture', 'mass creativity' and 'co-creation' appear to be contagious buzzwords that are rapidly infecting economic and cultural discourse on Web 2.0. Allegedly, peer production models will replace opaque, top-down business models, yielding to transparent, democratic structures where power is in the shared hands of responsible companies and skilled, qualified users. Manifestos such as Wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams, 2006) and 'We…
Spaces of Negotiation
This article develops an analytical framework to examine the contingent power relations between news organizations and platforms. Eschewing one-sided, monolithic perspectives on platform dominance, we instead theorize power as relational. From this perspective, we observe important variations in news organizations’ degree of platform in/dependence. Examining these variations, we propose the concept of spaces of negotiation, which refers to the op…
Facebook’s evolution
The purpose of this article is to operationalise an evolutionary perspective on the history of social media and to trace Facebook's evolution from a social networking site to a ‘platform-as-infrastructure’. Social media platforms such as Facebook change constantly on the level of their platform architectures, interfaces, governance frameworks, and control mechanisms, all while responding to their larger environments. By examining the evolution of…
The political economy of Facebook’s platformization in the mobile ecosystem
Facebook’s usage has reached a point that the platform’s infrastructural ambitions are to be taken very seriously. To understand the company’s evolution in the age of mobile media, we critically engage with the political economy of platformization. This article puts forward a conceptual framework and methodological apparatus to study Facebook’s economic growth and expanding platform boundaries in the mobile ecosystem through an analysis of the Fa…
Platform Practices in the Cultural Industries
The rise of contemporary platforms-from GAFAM in the West to the 'three kingdoms' of the Chinese Internet-is reconfiguring the production, distribution, and monetization of cultural content in staggering and complex ways. Given the nature and extent of these transformations, how can we systematically examine the platformization of cultural production? In this introduction, we propose that a comprehensive understanding of this process is as much i…
The mod industries? The industrial logic of non-market game production
This article seeks to make the relationship between non-market game developers (modders) and the game developer company explicit through game technology. It investigates a particular type of modding, i.e. total conversion mod teams, whose organization can be said to conform to the high-risk, technologically-advanced, capital-intensive, proprietary practice of the developer company. The notion 'proprietary experience' is applied to indicate an ind…
Crushing Candy
The goal of this article is to add a complementary perspective to the study of social network sites by surveying how the political economy of social media platforms relates to the structure of free-to-play games in their commodity form. Drawing on the theory of multisided markets and critical political economy, this article surveys the political economy of game apps and investigates how it is symbiotically related to the technological and economi…
Studying Platforms and Cultural Production
This introduction to the second special collection of articles on the platformization of the cultural industries foregrounds research methods and practices. Drawing from the 12 articles included in this collection, as well as the 14 articles published in the first collection, we identify commonalities in approaches, consistencies in traditions, and uniform modes of analysis. We argue that approaches that have been deployed in media industry studi…
Global perspectives on platforms and cultural production
Research on platforms and cultural production is dominated by studies that take the Anglo-American world and Northwestern Europe as their main points of reference. Central concepts in the field, consequently, bear the imprint of Western institutions, cultural practices, and ideals. Critically responding to this state of affairs, this opening essay of the special issue on Global Perspectives on Platforms and Cultural Production, consisting of 20 a…
On super apps and app stores
Aiming to enrich the conceptual vocabulary of platform and app studies, this article provides a critical political economic perspective on the media industry to understand how platform power is operationalized in the app economy. Using the China-based tech conglomerate Tencent as a case study, four mechanisms are discussed: conglomeration, financialization, platformization, and infrastructuralization. These mechanisms show how Tencent leveraged b…
Analyzing institutional platform power
This article calls for systematic analysis of the accumulation and exercise of institutional platform power in the digital economy. We examine how the relatively open mobile advertising ecosystem is nevertheless dominated by a handful of platform conglomerates, most prominently Google, Facebook, and Apple. Although extant scholarship acknowledges the concentration of corporate power in digital advertising, as well as its cultural, societal, and e…
Spinning is winning
Social casino apps are an emergent genre in the app economy that sits at the intersection of three different industries: casino gambling, freemium mobile games, and social media platforms. This institutional position has implications for the social casino app’s political economy and culture of consumption. We argue that social casino apps are representative of a broader casualization of risk that has taken hold in a platform society. By combining…
Facebook confessions
This article investigates the public confessions of a small group of ex-Facebook employees, investors, and founders who express regret helping to build the social media platform. Prompted by Facebook’s role in the 2016 United States elections and pointing to the platform’s unintended consequences, the confessions are more than formal admissions of sins. They speak of Facebook’s capacity to damage democratic decision-making and “exploit human psyc…
What is game studies anyway
In this introduction, game studies is argued to be a force of innovation for cultural studies. While game studies, as it has developed over the last 10 years, fits well within cultural studies' methodology and theory, it does more than benefit from cultural studies as a 'mother discipline'. Game studies proves itself to be a strong force, especially in its productive use of political economy to analyse games and gaming as a (new) cultural form. B…
TikTok’s tools
What is game studies anyway
What is game studies anyway
In this introduction, game studies is argued to be a force of innovation for cultural studies. While game studies, as it has developed over the last 10 years, fits well within cultural studies' methodology and theory, it does more than benefit from cultural studies as a 'mother discipline'. Game studies proves itself to be a strong force, especially in its productive use of political economy to analyse games and gaming as a (new) cultural form. B…
The mod industries? The industrial logic of non-market game production
This article seeks to make the relationship between non-market game developers (modders) and the game developer company explicit through game technology. It investigates a particular type of modding, i.e. total conversion mod teams, whose organization can be said to conform to the high-risk, technologically-advanced, capital-intensive, proprietary practice of the developer company. The notion 'proprietary experience' is applied to indicate an ind…
Wikinomics and its discontents
Collaborative culture', 'mass creativity' and 'co-creation' appear to be contagious buzzwords that are rapidly infecting economic and cultural discourse on Web 2.0. Allegedly, peer production models will replace opaque, top-down business models, yielding to transparent, democratic structures where power is in the shared hands of responsible companies and skilled, qualified users. Manifestos such as Wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams, 2006) and 'We…
Crushing Candy
The goal of this article is to add a complementary perspective to the study of social network sites by surveying how the political economy of social media platforms relates to the structure of free-to-play games in their commodity form. Drawing on the theory of multisided markets and critical political economy, this article surveys the political economy of game apps and investigates how it is symbiotically related to the technological and economi…
A Patchwork of Potential
Mainstreaming Misogyny
The platformization of cultural production
This article explores how the political economy of the cultural industries changes through platformization: the penetration of economic and infrastructural extensions of online platforms into the web, affecting the production, distribution, and circulation of cultural content. It pursues this investigation in critical dialogue with current research in business studies, political economy, and software studies. Focusing on the production of news an…
Reframing platform power
This article addresses the problem of platform power by probing current regulatory frameworks' basic assumptions about how tech firms operate in digital ecosystems. Platform power is generally assessed in terms of economic markets in which individual corporate actors harness technological innovations to compete fairly, thereby maximising consumer welfare. We propose three paradigmatic shifts in the conceptualisation of platform power. First, we s…
Platformisation
What is platformisation? This article contextualises, defines, and operationalises the concept. Drawing insights from different scholarly perspectives on platforms it develops a comprehensive approach to this process.
Lost in the App Store
This commentary discusses the political economy of apps. The authors found that Canadian-made game apps are notably absent in the Canadian App Store. This should be both worrying and surprising, as Canada has a relatively sizable game industry. While policy conversations on digital transformation focus on emerging technology, the authors point toward the power and politics of digital platforms as one of the key issues preventing growth in the Can…
Facebook’s evolution
The purpose of this article is to operationalise an evolutionary perspective on the history of social media and to trace Facebook's evolution from a social networking site to a ‘platform-as-infrastructure’. Social media platforms such as Facebook change constantly on the level of their platform architectures, interfaces, governance frameworks, and control mechanisms, all while responding to their larger environments. By examining the evolution of…
The political economy of Facebook’s platformization in the mobile ecosystem
Facebook’s usage has reached a point that the platform’s infrastructural ambitions are to be taken very seriously. To understand the company’s evolution in the age of mobile media, we critically engage with the political economy of platformization. This article puts forward a conceptual framework and methodological apparatus to study Facebook’s economic growth and expanding platform boundaries in the mobile ecosystem through an analysis of the Fa…
Platform Practices in the Cultural Industries
The rise of contemporary platforms-from GAFAM in the West to the 'three kingdoms' of the Chinese Internet-is reconfiguring the production, distribution, and monetization of cultural content in staggering and complex ways. Given the nature and extent of these transformations, how can we systematically examine the platformization of cultural production? In this introduction, we propose that a comprehensive understanding of this process is as much i…
"Bringing Your Vision to Life"
In this paper, we introduce the notion of production platforms by exploring the political economy of the real-time animation platform Unity by Unity Technologies. Contributing to the debate on the ‘platformization of cultural production’ by examining the penetration of Unity’s economic, infrastructural, and governance extensions beyond its platform boundaries, we argue Unity has become the de facto default for the development of apps thereby impa…
Platform Power & Public Value
This paper offers an analytical framework to critically examine the power relations that structure the online platform ecosystem. Following a relational understanding of power, it focuses on the connections between the five leading platform corporations - Alphabet-Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (GAFAM) - and the many other digital properties (i.e. platforms, websites, and apps) that populate the online ecosystem. Exploring these c…
Games of Empire Ten Years On
The panel will retrospectively evaluate the significance of the seminal text Games of Empire (2009) for new media and game studies, reflecting on the contribution of autonomous Marxism to the study of digital culture today, as well as the methodological move it performed in tracing continuities and discontinuities between sites of production and play. Each paper will take one or two key concepts from the original book, including Empire, multitude…
App Imperialism
In this paper, we introduce the notion of app imperialism by exploring the political economy of the Canadian iOS App Store. Building on Dal Yong Jin's concept of "platform imperialism", we argue that US companies dominate global app stores through the systematic acquisition of capital resources. App imperialism marks the outsized economic footprint and influence of US companies in national app stores. Using a longitudinal financial dataset, we qu…
Plataformização
Este artigo contextualiza, define e operacionaliza o conceito de plataformização. A partir de insights vindos de diferentes perspectivas acadêmicas sobre plataformas – estudos de software, economia política crítica, estudos de negócios e estudos culturais – desenvolvemos uma abordagem compreensiva em relação a esse processo. A plataformização é definida como a penetração de infraestruturas, processos econômicos e estruturas governamentais das pla…
Facebook confessions
This article investigates the public confessions of a small group of ex-Facebook employees, investors, and founders who express regret helping to build the social media platform. Prompted by Facebook’s role in the 2016 United States elections and pointing to the platform’s unintended consequences, the confessions are more than formal admissions of sins. They speak of Facebook’s capacity to damage democratic decision-making and “exploit human psyc…
Studying Platforms and Cultural Production
This introduction to the second special collection of articles on the platformization of the cultural industries foregrounds research methods and practices. Drawing from the 12 articles included in this collection, as well as the 14 articles published in the first collection, we identify commonalities in approaches, consistencies in traditions, and uniform modes of analysis. We argue that approaches that have been deployed in media industry studi…
Analyzing Platform Power in the Cultural Industries
Across cultures and contexts, digital platforms like YouTube, TikTok/Douyin, WeChat, and Spotify are fundamentally reshaping both the processes and products of cultural production—from music and news to entertainment and advertising. But, despite considerable attention to the perverse power of algorithms in various spheres of social and economic life, we contend that existing political economic frameworks fail to account for the distinctiveness o…
Engineering culture
This article investigates the ways content producers, marketers, and other promotional stakeholders work to optimize cultural goods and services for platform-dependent production, distribution, and monetization. We are particularly interested in how content creators find novel ways to work within, around, and even against platform politics and policies by manipulating algorithms, business models, and guidelines, or otherwise readying their conten…
Apps of Empire
This article interrogates Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter’s Games of Empire. Since its publication in 2009, the game industry evolved significantly, adding billions of players, dollars, and devices. One of the driving forces of this transformation has been the global diffusion of mobile media. This raises the question: Do mobile platforms and the app stores operated by Apple and Google allow for a radical departure from global hypercapitalism? This …
Spinning is winning
Social casino apps are an emergent genre in the app economy that sits at the intersection of three different industries: casino gambling, freemium mobile games, and social media platforms. This institutional position has implications for the social casino app’s political economy and culture of consumption. We argue that social casino apps are representative of a broader casualization of risk that has taken hold in a platform society. By combining…
Computer Science (28 works) · Political science (24 works) · Business (21 works) · Digital Games and Media (19 works) · Economics (18 works) · Digital Platforms and Economics (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · World Wide Web (12 works)