Thomas Poell
Biographic Data
| ID | 189936 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas Poell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Poell |
| SIGNATURE | POELL T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3664-2588 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 58 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 768 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
A perspective from Nollywood
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…
Shared responsibility, unequal power
With the adoption of the Digital Services Act, Digital Markets Act, Artificial Intelligence Act and European Media Freedom Act, the European Union has established an ambitious regulatory framework to oversee digital platforms and AI systems. This article maps the governance stakeholders involved in the operationalization of these four instruments and examines their distribution of powers and responsibilities. Building on existing typologies of pl…
Feminist television, racist Twitter? Feminist perspectives on the mediation of sexual misconduct in the Netherlands
This article examines the mediation of sexual misconduct in the Netherlands, focusing on the role of public television broadcasting and Twitter. Conceptually, the article draws on key feminist perspectives, which have, over the past decades, been vital for turning sexual misconduct into a central issue of public concern. Our analysis of Dutch public broadcasting (1984–2019) and Twitter (2011–2019) reveals that Dutch television consistently advoca…
The complementor perspective
This article examines the process of platformization from the perspective of platform complementors. It focusses on Dutch complementors—retailers, news organizations, transportation companies, and software start-ups—that developed Conversational Actions for Google Assistant. The analysis builds on a combination of digital fieldwork and interviews with Dutch developers, conversational specialists, and marketing and communication managers between 2…
Why the everyday is essential
This article examines everyday, non-activist forms of political communication on WeChat in the Beijing region. How is the communication of sensitive issues entwined with other daily communicative practices? And how do users negotiate the Chinese system of online surveillance and censorship? Examining how WeChat users communicate sensitive issues, knowing that every word and image they share can be tracked, analyzed, and acted upon, we, bringing t…
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…
Contrasting the Pragmatics of Spanishes
This special issue explores contrastive pragmatics with a focus on Spanish in comparison with other languages and varieties. The collection assembles studies comparing Spanish with Chinese, Greek, English, French, and Italian, as well as investigations of pragmatic variation across different varieties of Spanish. The contributions examine a diverse range of pragmatic phenomena, including humour, impoliteness, aggression, mitigation, requests, com…
Three Challenges for Media and Communication Studies in the Age of AI
The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) marks a critical turning point for media and communication scholarship. In dialogue with earlier analyses of platformization, this commentary identifies three interrelated challenges that emerge as GenAI systems are progressively integrated in key sectors of the economy and spheres of life. First, it explores the deep economic and infrastructural entanglements between GenAI and p…
AI competitions as infrastructures of power in medical imaging
This article examines how platform-based AI competitions structure power relations in medical imaging research. It focuses on two leading platforms, Kaggle and Grand Challenge, which provide organisational as well as infrastructural support to run AI competitions. In dialogue with critical AI and platform studies research, we investigate how such competitions are organised – under which infrastructural conditions and by whom – and how this shapes…
Hypercategorization and hypersexualization
Webcam sex platforms simultaneously host thousands of live performances. To allow users to explore these, platforms categorize. On porn sites, this has led to extremely detailed, hypercategorized classification systems. Developing the concept of “categorization regime,” which refers to all categorization options on a platform, we examine hypercategorization on 50 webcam sex platforms. In the heavily stigmatized, yet immensely popular, webcam sex …
Computational cross-media research
This article examines how the ‘refugee crisis’, sparked by the arrival of refugees from the Syrian civil war and other conflicts around the world, was articulated across Dutch television news programs and social media between 2013 and 2018. This crisis has been described as a key catalyst of the radicalization of European political discourse. Crucially, it took shape during a period of profound transformation of the media landscape, in which mass…
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…
Dependence in the online screen industry
The development of an online screen industry, dominated by a few American and Chinese streaming TV services and video-based platforms, triggers critical questions about the commercial and technological dependence of cultural producers within this industry. Drawing on research in media industries and platform studies, this paper develops a conceptual framework to systematically examine this dependence. Pursuing this aim, we propose to shift the fo…
Strategic Invisibility
This article examines how sexual content creators manage their (in)visibility, as they navigate the constraints of online hyper(in)visibility. So far, research has focussed on how creators more generally attempt to enhance their visibility through social media platforms. Yet, especially for sexual content creators, platform visibility is not straightforward. These creators are hyper(in)visible: facing simultaneous risks of erasure and public scru…
Platforms and the Precarity of Creator (In)visibility
This panel examines the tension between visibility and invisibility in the platform-creator relationship with a focus on highly precarious areas of cultural production, including online sex workers, body activists, and LGBTQ+ content creators. Together, the panelists consider: what kinds of creators are made visible on platforms? Conversely, who remains invisible? How do platforms and their algorithms afford (in)visibility to marginalized and sti…
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…
Ai Competitions as Infrastructures
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quickly being taken-up across scientific disciplines, medical imaging is no exception. To stimulate development and facilitate the scientific evaluation of new approaches, AI-based research in medical imaging is increasingly organised in a competitive manner through digital machine-learning development platforms such as Kaggle and Grand Challenge—two of the leading platforms in the field. For medical image analysis…
Strategic (In)visibility
Online creators need their content to be ‘seen’; visibility on platforms can provide financial, social, and representational benefits. A lot of vital research has been done on how creators try to enhance their visibility on platforms and struggle with the threat of invisibility. But, especially for marginalised creators, platformised visibility is not without risks. This paper attends to these risks and creators' tactical use of (in)visibility to…
The Politics of Platform Imaginaries
Examining the competing images, values, and purposes attached to digital health tracking platforms, this paper analyzes how platform imaginaries are constructed and negotiated in complex intersectional realities. It pursues this inquiry through a case study on how Fitbit and Apple Health have become involved in recent societal negotiations over female digital health tracking in the US. Female health tracking has a well-documented history of negot…
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…
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…
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…
Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr as platforms of alternative journalism
This article examines the appropriation of social media as platforms of alternative journalism by the protestors of the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto, Canada. The Toronto Community Mobilization Network, the network that coordinated the protests, urged participants to broadcast news using Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. This particular use of social media is studied in the light of the history and theory of alternative journalism. Analyzing a set of 11…
Understanding Social Media Logic
Over the past decade, social media platforms have penetrated deeply into the mechanics of everyday life, affecting people's informal interactions, as well as institutional structures and professional routines. Far from being neutral platforms for everyone, social media have changed the conditions and rules of social interaction. In this article, we examine the intricate dynamic between social media platforms, mass media, users, and social institu…
Platform Imaginaries and Dutch Public Service Media
Over the past decade, public service media (PSM) have increasingly distributed content through digital platforms, most prominently YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This article explores how this process of platformization, the integration of digital platforms in PSM, affects the public service remit of promoting key public values, such as universality, independence, and diversity. Specifically, it interrogates how Dutch PSM imagine plat…
Making Public Television Social? Public Service Broadcasting and the Challenges of Social Media
This article investigates how the rise of social media affects European public service broadcasting (PSB), particularly in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands. We explore the encounter of “social” and “public” on three levels: the level of institution, professional practice, and content. After investigating these three levels, we address the more general question of how public broadcasters are coping with the challenges of social media. How ca…
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…
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…
Governing online platforms
Online platforms, from Facebook to Twitter, and from Coursera to Uber, have become deeply involved in a wide range of public activities, including journalism, civic engagement, education, and transport. As such, they have started to play a vital role in the realization of important public values and policy objectives associated with these activities. Based on insights from theories about risk sharing and the problem of many hands, this article de…
Data and agency
This introduction to the special issue on data and agency argues that datafication should not only be understood as the process of collecting and analysing data about Internet users, but also as feeding such data back to users, enabling them to orient themselves in the world. It is important that debates about data power recognise that data is also generated, collected and analysed by alternative actors, enhancing rather than undermining the agen…
Understanding the promises and premises of online health platforms
This article investigates the claims and complexities involved in the platform-based economics of health and fitness apps. We examine a double-edged logic inscribed in these platforms, promising to offer personal solutions to medical problems while also contributing to the public good. On the one hand, online platforms serve as personalized data-driven services to their customers. On the other hand, they allegedly serve public interests, such as …
Rearticulating Audience Engagement
This introduction to the special issue on social media and television audience engagement sketches the key dimensions that affect how audiences are transformed through the development of social platforms. Building on the five contributions to the special issue, we identify three dimensions that deserve further attention: (1) the character of national media cultures, (2) whether social platforms are employed by public or commercial broadcasters, a…
Social media, temporality, and the legitimacy of protest
This article examines how the rise of social media affects the temporal relations of protest communication. Following a relational approach, it traces how regimes of temporality are constructed and transformed through the entanglement between media infrastructures, institutions, and practices. These regimes involve particular ‘speeds’ -the rate at which media content is renewed – as well as ‘temporal orientations’ towards present, past, and futur…
From Counterpublics to Contentious Publicness
This article presents a new approach to the study of public contestation through social media. Developing this approach, we make three conceptual moves. First, to capture the dynamic character of contemporary contestation, we shift attention from publics to publicness as an interactive process. Second, we turn the focus from the “counter,” as a public or space distinct from the dominant sphere, towards distributed forms of contention. Finally, in…
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…
Three Challenges for Media Studies in the Age of Platforms
Digital platforms, from Instagram to Spotify, have become central to the production, distribution, and monetization of cultural content. This essay discusses how this process of platformization poses three interrelated challenges for the research on and governance of contemporary cultural industries. First, platformization complicates the question of media concentration, as platform corporations integrate highly diverse businesses, not only hosti…
Strategic Invisibility
This article examines how sexual content creators manage their (in)visibility, as they navigate the constraints of online hyper(in)visibility. So far, research has focussed on how creators more generally attempt to enhance their visibility through social media platforms. Yet, especially for sexual content creators, platform visibility is not straightforward. These creators are hyper(in)visible: facing simultaneous risks of erasure and public scru…
Connecting Activists and Journalists
This article examines how feminist activists, women's organizations, and journalists in India connected with each other through Twitter following the gang rape incident in New Delhi in December 2012. First, the investigation draws on a set of +15 million tweets specifically focused on rape and gang rape. These tweets, which appeared between 16 January 2013 and 16 January 2014, were collected and analysed with the DMI Twitter Capture and Analysis …
Data critique and analytical opportunities for very large Facebook Pages
This paper discusses the empirical, Application Programming Interface (API)-based analysis of very large Facebook Pages. Looking in detail at the technical characteristics, conventions, and peculiarities of Facebook’s architecture and data interface, we argue that such technical fieldwork is essential to data-driven research, both as a crucial form of data critique and as a way to identify analytical opportunities. Using the “We are all Khaled Sa…
Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space
This introduction to the Special Issue of Social Media + Society discusses the key theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches needed to gain insight into how social platforms intervene in public space. It starts by highlighting how in the emerging platform society public and private communication is reshaped by social media's commercial mechanisms, transforming the political economy of the media landscape. Given the complex character …
Dependence in the online screen industry
The development of an online screen industry, dominated by a few American and Chinese streaming TV services and video-based platforms, triggers critical questions about the commercial and technological dependence of cultural producers within this industry. Drawing on research in media industries and platform studies, this paper develops a conceptual framework to systematically examine this dependence. Pursuing this aim, we propose to shift the fo…
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…
Facebook polls as proto-democratic instruments in the Egyptian revolution
This article examines the dynamics of political participation on the ‘We Are All Khaled Said’ Facebook page, which hosted the call for Egypt’s 25 January 2011 revolution. It shows that the page served as a proto-democratic instrument by introducing both qualitative and quantitative polls and following up with actions based on majority opinion. This argument is developed through an analysis of discussion threads and polls from the page, selected f…
Computational cross-media research
This article examines how the ‘refugee crisis’, sparked by the arrival of refugees from the Syrian civil war and other conflicts around the world, was articulated across Dutch television news programs and social media between 2013 and 2018. This crisis has been described as a key catalyst of the radicalization of European political discourse. Crucially, it took shape during a period of profound transformation of the media landscape, in which mass…
Liberal Democracy versus Late Medieval Constitutionalism
T his article rejects the claim that medieval constitutional arrangements have provided the basis for the development of representative democracy in Europe.Through a study of the late eighteenth century Dutch Republic, it shows instead that medieval institutions formed an obstacle for democratization.Although these institutions did enable the political integration of privileged citizens, they obstructed efforts by liberal reformers to introduce m…
Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr as platforms of alternative journalism
This article examines the appropriation of social media as platforms of alternative journalism by the protestors of the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto, Canada. The Toronto Community Mobilization Network, the network that coordinated the protests, urged participants to broadcast news using Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. This particular use of social media is studied in the light of the history and theory of alternative journalism. Analyzing a set of 11…
Android and the political economy of the mobile Internet
This paper examines how and why Google in developing Android, the popular mobile operating system, has strategically adopted particular open source practices, but ignored others. It explores how through these practices, the corporation has been able to cultivate and control a vast mobile Internet ecology. This ecology involves large telcos and equipment manufacturers, as well as a mass of third party application developers and hundreds of million…
Understanding Social Media Logic
Over the past decade, social media platforms have penetrated deeply into the mechanics of everyday life, affecting people's informal interactions, as well as institutional structures and professional routines. Far from being neutral platforms for everyone, social media have changed the conditions and rules of social interaction. In this article, we examine the intricate dynamic between social media platforms, mass media, users, and social instit…
Understanding Social Media Logic
Over the past decade, social media platforms have penetrated deeply into the mechanics of everyday life, affecting people's informal interactions, as well as institutional structures and professional routines. Far from being neutral platforms for everyone, social media have changed the conditions and rules of social interaction. In this article, we examine the intricate dynamic between social media platforms, mass media, users, and social institu…
Social media and the transformation of activist communication
How does the massive use of social media in contemporary protests affect the character of activist communication? Moving away from the conceptualization of social media as tools, this research explores how activist social media communication is entangled with and shaped by heterogeneous techno-cultural and political economic relations. This exploration is pursued through a case study on the social media reporting efforts of the Toronto Community …
Making Public Television Social? Public Service Broadcasting and the Challenges of Social Media
This article investigates how the rise of social media affects European public service broadcasting (PSB), particularly in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands. We explore the encounter of “social” and “public” on three levels: the level of institution, professional practice, and content. After investigating these three levels, we address the more general question of how public broadcasters are coping with the challenges of social media. How ca…
Connecting Activists and Journalists
This article examines how feminist activists, women's organizations, and journalists in India connected with each other through Twitter following the gang rape incident in New Delhi in December 2012. First, the investigation draws on a set of +15 million tweets specifically focused on rape and gang rape. These tweets, which appeared between 16 January 2013 and 16 January 2014, were collected and analysed with the DMI Twitter Capture and Analysis …
Data critique and analytical opportunities for very large Facebook Pages
This paper discusses the empirical, Application Programming Interface (API)-based analysis of very large Facebook Pages. Looking in detail at the technical characteristics, conventions, and peculiarities of Facebook’s architecture and data interface, we argue that such technical fieldwork is essential to data-driven research, both as a crucial form of data critique and as a way to identify analytical opportunities. Using the “We are all Khaled Sa…
Rearticulating Audience Engagement
This introduction to the special issue on social media and television audience engagement sketches the key dimensions that affect how audiences are transformed through the development of social platforms. Building on the five contributions to the special issue, we identify three dimensions that deserve further attention: (1) the character of national media cultures, (2) whether social platforms are employed by public or commercial broadcasters, a…
Data and agency
This introduction to the special issue on data and agency argues that datafication should not only be understood as the process of collecting and analysing data about Internet users, but also as feeding such data back to users, enabling them to orient themselves in the world. It is important that debates about data power recognise that data is also generated, collected and analysed by alternative actors, enhancing rather than undermining the agen…
Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space
This introduction to the Special Issue of Social Media + Society discusses the key theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches needed to gain insight into how social platforms intervene in public space. It starts by highlighting how in the emerging platform society public and private communication is reshaped by social media's commercial mechanisms, transforming the political economy of the media landscape. Given the complex character …
Protest leadership in the age of social media
This article challenges the idea that social media protest mobilization and communication are primarily propelled by the self-motivated sharing of ideas, plans, images, and resources. It shows that leadership plays a vital role in steering popular contention on key social platforms. This argument is developed through a detailed case study on the interaction between the administrators and users of the Kullena Khaled Said Facebook page, the most po…
Understanding the promises and premises of online health platforms
This article investigates the claims and complexities involved in the platform-based economics of health and fitness apps. We examine a double-edged logic inscribed in these platforms, promising to offer personal solutions to medical problems while also contributing to the public good. On the one hand, online platforms serve as personalized data-driven services to their customers. On the other hand, they allegedly serve public interests, such as …
Global Cultures of Contestation
The Platform Society
Individuals all over the world can use Airbnb to rent an apartment in a foreign city, check Coursera to find a course on statistics, join PatientsLikeMe to exchange information about one’s disease, hail a cab using Uber, or read the news through Facebook’s Instant Articles. In The Platform Society, Van Dijck, Poell, and De Waal offer a comprehensive analysis of a connective world where platforms have penetrated the heart of societies—disrupting m…
The Sage Handbook of Social Media
The world is in the midst of a social media paradigm. Once viewed as trivial and peripheral, social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and WeChat have become an important part of the information and communication infrastructure of society. They are bound up with business and politics as well as everyday life, work, and personal relationships. This international Handbook addresses the most significant research themes, methodological approaches…
Facebook polls as proto-democratic instruments in the Egyptian revolution
This article examines the dynamics of political participation on the ‘We Are All Khaled Said’ Facebook page, which hosted the call for Egypt’s 25 January 2011 revolution. It shows that the page served as a proto-democratic instrument by introducing both qualitative and quantitative polls and following up with actions based on majority opinion. This argument is developed through an analysis of discussion threads and polls from the page, selected f…
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…
Governing online platforms
Online platforms, from Facebook to Twitter, and from Coursera to Uber, have become deeply involved in a wide range of public activities, including journalism, civic engagement, education, and transport. As such, they have started to play a vital role in the realization of important public values and policy objectives associated with these activities. Based on insights from theories about risk sharing and the problem of many hands, this article de…
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…
The platformization of Chinese Society
Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as platforms for collaborative consumption such as Airbnb and Uber, are emerging as new power players that challenge older institutions ...
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.
Making Media
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…
Computer Science (31 works) · Political science (31 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Business (22 works) · Social Media and Politics (19 works) · Politics (18 works) · Social media (16 works) · Public relations (14 works) · Digital Platforms and Economics (13 works) · Law (12 works)