Anne Helmond
Biographic Data
| ID | 252945 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anne Helmond |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anne |
| FAMILY NAME | Helmond |
| SIGNATURE | HELMOND A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4327-4012 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 477 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The datafied web
Following the 6th RESAW conference held at the University of Siegen in June 2025, we extended the conversation through follow-up discussions with selected participants, including both keynote speakers, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup and Jonathan W. Y. Gray. This round-doc discussion brings them into dialogue with Miglė Bareikytė, Carolin Gerlitz, Sebastian Giessmann, Anne Helmond, and Ian Milligan, creating a space for interdisciplinary exchange. It re-ex…
The Platformization of Everything
A decade after the term was coined, “platformization” has evolved from describing the infrastructural expansion of platforms into other domains to capturing a broader transformation in how platforms organize (digital) life. This article traces this shift from the early social web to today’s AI-centered platform models. The retirement of Facebook’s Like button and Google’s “Suncatcher” space-based AI initiative are used as illustrative examples to…
Exploring Appification
This panel offers a reflection on the evolution and transformations of apps and app studies over the past decade, emphasizing how apps have seamlessly integrated into our daily routines and shaped our cultural and economic landscape. This process, known as ‘appification’, involves integrating various aspects of daily life and activities into mobile applications, fundamentally altering how we communicate, access information, make payments, and use…
The Political Economy of Ai as Platform
The artificial intelligence (AI) sector is experiencing rapid growth, with a projected market size of $1.3 trillion by 2032 according to industry reports. The landscape shifted significantly with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, prompting major players like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, alongside popular apps such as TikTok and Snapchat, to make substantial investments in AI. There has been an influx of new AI products and updates, resh…
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…
Super-appification
Super apps’ are on the rise. This study explores the characteristics, origins, and manifestations of these apps worldwide, presenting the concept of ‘super-appification’ to describe processes of conglomeration in the global digital economy. Super apps aim to become deeply integrated into people’s everyday lives, capturing and monetising essential activities. By analysing 41 super apps, we identify four distinct types of ‘super-app constellations’…
Big AI
Critical scholars contend that 'There is no AI without Big Tech'. This study delves into the substantial role played by major technology conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google (Alphabet), in the 'industrialisation of artificial intelligence'. This concept encapsulates the shift of AI technologies from the research and development stage to practical, real-world applications across diverse industry sectors, resulting in new dependen…
Big Ai
Cloud infrastructure platforms underpin most of today’s internet, functioning as the operating system of the internet and representing the most important source of revenue for Big Tech companies. While most of the current hype around (“generative”) AI is focused on specific successful products and initiatives like OpenAI (ChatGPT, DALL·E 2) and Stability AI (Stable Diffusion), they would not have been possible without the significant infrastructu…
Super-Appification
“Super apps” are on the rise and gaining popularity worldwide, especially in Southeast Asia, India and Africa. These are “do-everything apps” that offer a wide range of services in a single interface, making them more integrated into people's lives. Super apps thus highlight the organisation, political economy and geopolitics of the platformisation process in the app economy. While most studies on super apps focus on Chinese and Southeast Asian a…
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…
From healthy communities to toxic debates
This article examines how the commenting platform Disqus changed the way it speaks about commenting and moderation over time. To understand this evolving self-presentation, we used the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to analyse the company’s website and blog between 2007 and 2021. By combining interpretative close-reading approaches with computerised distant-reading procedures, we examined how Disqus tried to advance online discussion and dealt …
API Governance
Researchers, policymakers, and competition and regulation authorities worldwide recognize the utility of application programming interfaces (APIs) in powering the digital economy and driving datafication and platformization processes. However, it remains unclear how the APIs of leading social media relate to platform governance and how this relationship evolved. This article traces the evolution of Facebook's APIs, which evolved from a relatively…
Pandemic platform governance
This article provides an exploratory systematic mapping of the global ecosystem of COVID-19 pandemic response apps. After considering policy updates by Google Play's and Apple's App Store, we analyse all the available response apps in July 2020; their different response types; the apps' developers and geographical distribution; the ecosystem's ' generativity' and developers' responsiveness during the unfolding pandemic; the apps' discursive posit…
Social Media in the Audience Economy
Social media platforms’ digital advertising revenues depend considerably on partnerships. Business partnerships are endemic and essential to the business of platforms, yet their role remains relatively underexplored in the literature on platformisation and platform power. This paper considers the significance of partnerships in the social media ecosystem to better understand how industry platforms, and the infrastructure they build, mediate and s…
The Governance of Facebook Platform
Competition authorities and regulators worldwide recognise application programming interfaces (APIs) for powering the digital economy and driving processes of datafication and platformisation. However, it is unclear how APIs tie into the power of, and governance by, large digital platforms. This paper traces the relationality between Facebook’s APIs, platform governance, and data strategy based on an empirical and evolutionary analysis. It examin…
How partners mediate platform power
Social media platforms' digital advertising revenues depend considerably on partnerships. Business partnerships are endemic and essential to the business of platforms, yet their role remains relatively underexplored in the literature on platformisation and platform power. This article considers the significance of partnerships in the social media ecosystem to better understand how industry platforms, and the infrastructure they build, mediate and…
The Evolution of Facebook's Graph Api
Facebook’s application programming interfaces (APIs) enable third-party app developers to access data and functionality and have become central to many of the platform’s ongoing data scandals and privacy concerns. Understanding how the platform and its APIs evolve and how it responds to issues requires looking closely and empirically at the evolution of access points, data structures, and graph data structures. The technicity of APIs is crucial f…
The historical trajectories of algorithmic techniques
Bernhard Rieder is Associate Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and a collaborator with the Digital Methods Initiative. His research focuses on the history, theory and politics of software and in particular on the role algorithms play in social processes and in the production of knowledge and culture. This includes work on the analysis, development, and application of computational research methods as well a…
Legacy systems
This special issue explores the productive ambiguity of the concept of “legacy systems” in different directions to address the past’s persistence as well as its felt absence. The contributions revolve around a socio-cultural sense of legacy – of ideas built into Internet culture and how Internet devices continue to operate into the present. They also address cultural and political legacies relevant to histories of networks and digital culture, an…
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…
Multi-Situated App Studies
This article discusses methodological approaches to app studies, focusing on their embeddedness and situatedness within multiple infrastructural settings. Our approach involves close attention to the multivalent affordances of apps as software packages, particularly their capacity to enter into diverse groupings and relations depending on different infrastructural situations. The changing situations they evoke and participate in, accordingly, mak…
The Affordances of Social Media Platforms
This chapter reflects on the concept of affordance as a key term for understanding and analysing social media interfaces and the relations between technology and its users. In outlining its specific intellectual trajectory from psychology, to technology and design studies, sociology, and communication and media studies, our intention is to focus on some of the many–and sometimes conflicting–ways in which affordance has been conceptualized and ope…
The Platformization of the Web
In this article, I inquire into Facebook's development as a platform by situating it within the transformation of social network sites into social media platforms. I explore this shift with a historical perspective on, what I refer to as, platformization, or the rise of the platform as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the social web and its consequences. Platformization entails the extension of social media platforms into the re…
‘Raw data’ is an oxymoron
The like economy
The paper examines Facebook’s ambition to extend into the entire web by focusing on social buttons and developing a medium-specific platform critique. It contextualises the rise of buttons and counters as metrics for user engagement and links them to different web economies. Facebook’s Like buttons enable multiple data flows between various actors, contributing to a simultaneous de- and re-centralisation of the web. They allow the instant transfo…
The Platformization of the Web
In this article, I inquire into Facebook's development as a platform by situating it within the transformation of social network sites into social media platforms. I explore this shift with a historical perspective on, what I refer to as, platformization, or the rise of the platform as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the social web and its consequences. Platformization entails the extension of social media platforms into the re…
The Politics of Real-time
This paper enquires into the politics of real-time in online media. It suggests that real-time cannot be accounted for as a universal temporal frame in which events happen, but explores the making of real-time from a device perspective focusing on the temporalities of platforms. Based on an empirical study exploring the pace at which various online media produce new content, we trace the different rhythms, patterns or tempos created by the interp…
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…
Multi-Situated App Studies
This article discusses methodological approaches to app studies, focusing on their embeddedness and situatedness within multiple infrastructural settings. Our approach involves close attention to the multivalent affordances of apps as software packages, particularly their capacity to enter into diverse groupings and relations depending on different infrastructural situations. The changing situations they evoke and participate in, accordingly, mak…
Big AI
Critical scholars contend that 'There is no AI without Big Tech'. This study delves into the substantial role played by major technology conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google (Alphabet), in the 'industrialisation of artificial intelligence'. This concept encapsulates the shift of AI technologies from the research and development stage to practical, real-world applications across diverse industry sectors, resulting in new dependen…
How partners mediate platform power
Social media platforms' digital advertising revenues depend considerably on partnerships. Business partnerships are endemic and essential to the business of platforms, yet their role remains relatively underexplored in the literature on platformisation and platform power. This article considers the significance of partnerships in the social media ecosystem to better understand how industry platforms, and the infrastructure they build, mediate and…
API Governance
Researchers, policymakers, and competition and regulation authorities worldwide recognize the utility of application programming interfaces (APIs) in powering the digital economy and driving datafication and platformization processes. However, it remains unclear how the APIs of leading social media relate to platform governance and how this relationship evolved. This article traces the evolution of Facebook's APIs, which evolved from a relatively…
Super-appification
Super apps’ are on the rise. This study explores the characteristics, origins, and manifestations of these apps worldwide, presenting the concept of ‘super-appification’ to describe processes of conglomeration in the global digital economy. Super apps aim to become deeply integrated into people’s everyday lives, capturing and monetising essential activities. By analysing 41 super apps, we identify four distinct types of ‘super-app constellations’…
Legacy systems
This special issue explores the productive ambiguity of the concept of “legacy systems” in different directions to address the past’s persistence as well as its felt absence. The contributions revolve around a socio-cultural sense of legacy – of ideas built into Internet culture and how Internet devices continue to operate into the present. They also address cultural and political legacies relevant to histories of networks and digital culture, an…
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…
Where do bloggers blog? Platform transitions within the historical Dutch blogosphere
The blogosphere has played an instrumental role in the transition and the evolution of linking technologies and practices. This research traces and maps historical changes in the Dutch blogosphere and the interconnections between blogs, which — traditionally considered — turn a set of blogs into a blogosphere. This paper will discuss the definition of the blogosphere by asking who the actors are which make up the blogosphere through its interconn…
The like economy
The paper examines Facebook’s ambition to extend into the entire web by focusing on social buttons and developing a medium-specific platform critique. It contextualises the rise of buttons and counters as metrics for user engagement and links them to different web economies. Facebook’s Like buttons enable multiple data flows between various actors, contributing to a simultaneous de- and re-centralisation of the web. They allow the instant transfo…
‘Raw data’ is an oxymoron
The Politics of Real-time
This paper enquires into the politics of real-time in online media. It suggests that real-time cannot be accounted for as a universal temporal frame in which events happen, but explores the making of real-time from a device perspective focusing on the temporalities of platforms. Based on an empirical study exploring the pace at which various online media produce new content, we trace the different rhythms, patterns or tempos created by the interp…
The Platformization of the Web
In this article, I inquire into Facebook's development as a platform by situating it within the transformation of social network sites into social media platforms. I explore this shift with a historical perspective on, what I refer to as, platformization, or the rise of the platform as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the social web and its consequences. Platformization entails the extension of social media platforms into the re…
The Affordances of Social Media Platforms
This chapter reflects on the concept of affordance as a key term for understanding and analysing social media interfaces and the relations between technology and its users. In outlining its specific intellectual trajectory from psychology, to technology and design studies, sociology, and communication and media studies, our intention is to focus on some of the many–and sometimes conflicting–ways in which affordance has been conceptualized and ope…
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…
Multi-Situated App Studies
This article discusses methodological approaches to app studies, focusing on their embeddedness and situatedness within multiple infrastructural settings. Our approach involves close attention to the multivalent affordances of apps as software packages, particularly their capacity to enter into diverse groupings and relations depending on different infrastructural situations. The changing situations they evoke and participate in, accordingly, mak…
The Evolution of Facebook's Graph Api
Facebook’s application programming interfaces (APIs) enable third-party app developers to access data and functionality and have become central to many of the platform’s ongoing data scandals and privacy concerns. Understanding how the platform and its APIs evolve and how it responds to issues requires looking closely and empirically at the evolution of access points, data structures, and graph data structures. The technicity of APIs is crucial f…
The historical trajectories of algorithmic techniques
Bernhard Rieder is Associate Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and a collaborator with the Digital Methods Initiative. His research focuses on the history, theory and politics of software and in particular on the role algorithms play in social processes and in the production of knowledge and culture. This includes work on the analysis, development, and application of computational research methods as well a…
Legacy systems
This special issue explores the productive ambiguity of the concept of “legacy systems” in different directions to address the past’s persistence as well as its felt absence. The contributions revolve around a socio-cultural sense of legacy – of ideas built into Internet culture and how Internet devices continue to operate into the present. They also address cultural and political legacies relevant to histories of networks and digital culture, an…
Pandemic platform governance
This article provides an exploratory systematic mapping of the global ecosystem of COVID-19 pandemic response apps. After considering policy updates by Google Play's and Apple's App Store, we analyse all the available response apps in July 2020; their different response types; the apps' developers and geographical distribution; the ecosystem's ' generativity' and developers' responsiveness during the unfolding pandemic; the apps' discursive posit…
Social Media in the Audience Economy
Social media platforms’ digital advertising revenues depend considerably on partnerships. Business partnerships are endemic and essential to the business of platforms, yet their role remains relatively underexplored in the literature on platformisation and platform power. This paper considers the significance of partnerships in the social media ecosystem to better understand how industry platforms, and the infrastructure they build, mediate and s…
The Governance of Facebook Platform
Competition authorities and regulators worldwide recognise application programming interfaces (APIs) for powering the digital economy and driving processes of datafication and platformisation. However, it is unclear how APIs tie into the power of, and governance by, large digital platforms. This paper traces the relationality between Facebook’s APIs, platform governance, and data strategy based on an empirical and evolutionary analysis. It examin…
How partners mediate platform power
Social media platforms' digital advertising revenues depend considerably on partnerships. Business partnerships are endemic and essential to the business of platforms, yet their role remains relatively underexplored in the literature on platformisation and platform power. This article considers the significance of partnerships in the social media ecosystem to better understand how industry platforms, and the infrastructure they build, mediate and…
From healthy communities to toxic debates
This article examines how the commenting platform Disqus changed the way it speaks about commenting and moderation over time. To understand this evolving self-presentation, we used the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to analyse the company’s website and blog between 2007 and 2021. By combining interpretative close-reading approaches with computerised distant-reading procedures, we examined how Disqus tried to advance online discussion and dealt …
API Governance
Researchers, policymakers, and competition and regulation authorities worldwide recognize the utility of application programming interfaces (APIs) in powering the digital economy and driving datafication and platformization processes. However, it remains unclear how the APIs of leading social media relate to platform governance and how this relationship evolved. This article traces the evolution of Facebook's APIs, which evolved from a relatively…
Big Ai
Cloud infrastructure platforms underpin most of today’s internet, functioning as the operating system of the internet and representing the most important source of revenue for Big Tech companies. While most of the current hype around (“generative”) AI is focused on specific successful products and initiatives like OpenAI (ChatGPT, DALL·E 2) and Stability AI (Stable Diffusion), they would not have been possible without the significant infrastructu…
Super-Appification
“Super apps” are on the rise and gaining popularity worldwide, especially in Southeast Asia, India and Africa. These are “do-everything apps” that offer a wide range of services in a single interface, making them more integrated into people's lives. Super apps thus highlight the organisation, political economy and geopolitics of the platformisation process in the app economy. While most studies on super apps focus on Chinese and Southeast Asian a…
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…
Super-appification
Super apps’ are on the rise. This study explores the characteristics, origins, and manifestations of these apps worldwide, presenting the concept of ‘super-appification’ to describe processes of conglomeration in the global digital economy. Super apps aim to become deeply integrated into people’s everyday lives, capturing and monetising essential activities. By analysing 41 super apps, we identify four distinct types of ‘super-app constellations’…
Big AI
Critical scholars contend that 'There is no AI without Big Tech'. This study delves into the substantial role played by major technology conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google (Alphabet), in the 'industrialisation of artificial intelligence'. This concept encapsulates the shift of AI technologies from the research and development stage to practical, real-world applications across diverse industry sectors, resulting in new dependen…
Exploring Appification
This panel offers a reflection on the evolution and transformations of apps and app studies over the past decade, emphasizing how apps have seamlessly integrated into our daily routines and shaped our cultural and economic landscape. This process, known as ‘appification’, involves integrating various aspects of daily life and activities into mobile applications, fundamentally altering how we communicate, access information, make payments, and use…
The Political Economy of Ai as Platform
The artificial intelligence (AI) sector is experiencing rapid growth, with a projected market size of $1.3 trillion by 2032 according to industry reports. The landscape shifted significantly with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, prompting major players like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, alongside popular apps such as TikTok and Snapchat, to make substantial investments in AI. There has been an influx of new AI products and updates, resh…
Computer Science (19 works) · World Wide Web (17 works) · Business (14 works) · Political science (13 works) · Social media (11 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Data science (8 works) · Digital Platforms and Economics (8 works) · Social Media and Politics (7 works) · Politics (6 works)