José Van Dijck
Biographic Data
| ID | 270063 |
|---|---|
| NAME | José Van Dijck |
| GIVEN NAMES | José |
| FAMILY NAME | Van Dijck |
| SIGNATURE | VAN DIJCK J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0499-9045 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 66 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1434 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 64 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Shared responsibility, unequal power: Mapping the limitations of multi-stakeholderism in the EU’s digital governance
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…
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
Transgressing local, national, global spheres: The blackboxed dynamics of platformization and infrastructuralization of primary education
This article analyzes how platformization and infrastructuralization are currently reshaping the educational sector by engaging in ‘sphere transgressions’, resulting in the merging of a local and national public sector into a transnational and global digital market. It elaborates on the adaptive learning application Bingel as a case-in-point to exemplify how sphere transgressions are conducive to data accumulation across national markets and sect…
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…
Producing new farmers in Chinese rural live E-commerce: Platformization, labor, and live E-commerce sellers in Huaiyang
This research examines the complex labor practices of live e-commerce sellers in rural China. Migrant workers are being drawn back to their rural homes by the techno-entrepreneurial prospects of live e-commerce being used as part of the “new farmers” branding. We examine how livestreaming platforms transform the labor process of rural produce sellers, zooming in on the physical work and transactional labor involved in the process of platformizati…
Understanding data professionals in the police: A qualitative study of system-level bureaucrats
Through the introduction of algorithmic systems into police organizations, a new employee emerged: the data professional. Contrary to street-level officers, little is known of the discretionary power of these system-level bureaucrats. Our qualitative research into the Netherlands Police provides a first empirical and theoretical understanding. The study shows that data professionals exert discretion and are aware of public values, but their value…
Trust, media, and science in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic
The first global pandemic of the information age has revealed how the coordinated spread of accurate information and the communication of relevant expert knowledge rely on functioning media channels, platforms, and institutions. As such, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed, and sometimes even catalyzed, longer-running societal processes through which traditional gatekeepers of scientific truth and expertise have been challenged or side-stepped, …
Observe, inspect, modify: Three conditions for generative AI governance
In a world increasingly shaped by generative AI systems like ChatGPT, the absence of benchmarks to examine the efficacy of oversight mechanisms is a problem for research and policy. What are the structural conditions for governing generative AI systems? To answer this question, it is crucial to situate generative AI systems as regulatory objects: material items that can be governed. On this conceptual basis, we introduce three high-level conditio…
Governed by Edtech? Valuing Pedagogical Autonomy in a Platform Society
In this essay, Niels Kerssens and José van Dijck discuss the implications of platformization on the key public value of pedagogical autonomy in K–12 education. They focus on two interconnected concerns: how the integration of education into a global digital infrastructure contests the institutional pedagogical autonomy of schools and how the integration of digital platforms with educational practices in classrooms challenges the professional peda…
Climate communication: How researchers navigate between scientific truth and media publics
Recent attacks on scientific authority have intensified calls for climate scientists to seek out a more active stake in public engagement. Yet, today’s media landscape presents scientists with the challenge of gaining the epistemic trust of diverse audiences. This article qualitatively investigates how publicly engaged academic climate researchers imagine the public as they partake in various science communication practices. It finds that scienti…
Deplatformization, platform governance and global geopolitics: Interview with José van Dijck
In this interview, José van Dijck distinguishes the concept of deplatformization from deplatforming and platformization. It describes the phenomena of the systematic pushing back of controversial platforms and their communities to the edge of the platform ecosystem, dominated by mainstream platforms (such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft). Deplatformization further demonstrates the hierarchical power relations within the global p…
Ver a floresta por suas árvores: Visualizando plataformização e sua governança
As complexidades das plataformas estão cada vez mais em desacordo com os conceitos jurídicos e econômicos rígidos que fundamentam sua governança. Este artigo busca analisar a plataformização através da lente metafórica de uma árvore para entender os ecossistemas de informação como estruturas hierárquicas e interdependentes. Adotando uma abordagem holística à plataformização, essa metáfora visual pode inspirar um conjunto de princípios para remode…
The platformization of primary education in The Netherlands
How does platformization work as vehicle for the integration of public online education into a private global digital infrastructure? And how can education technologies (‘edtech’) be governed at various levels to benefit the public good? In this article, we examine online environments in primary schools in The Netherlands, a traditionally strong public-school system, where platformization has substantially impacted the precarious balance between …
Deplatformization and the governance of the platform ecosystem
This article analyzes deplatformization as an implied governance strategy by major tech companies to detoxify the platform ecosystem of radical content while consolidating their power as designers, operators, and governors of that same ecosystem. Deplatformization is different from deplatforming: it entails a systemic effort to push back encroaching radical right-wing platforms to the fringes of the ecosystem by denying them the infrastructural s…
Governing trust in European platform societies: Introduction to the special issue
Seeing into the Future: A Short History of Prediction by Martin van Creveld
Governing digital societies: Private platforms, public values
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…
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…
Seeing the forest for the trees: Visualizing platformization and its governance
The complexities of platforms are increasingly at odds with the narrow legal and economic concepts in which their governance is grounded. This article aims to analyze platformization through the metaphorical lens of a tree to make sense of information ecosystems as hierarchical and interdependent structures. The layered shape of the tree draws attention to the dynamics of power concentration: vertical integration, infrastructuralization, and cros…
Come salvaguardare i valori pubblici in un mondo interconnesso? Le sfide per l’Europa. Translated by Eleonora Benecchi
Over the past three years, we have witnessed how online digital platforms have deeply penetrated every sector in society, disrupting markets, labor relations and institutions. Five American tech companies (Google-Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft) are now dominating the western world, not just transforming social and civic practices, but affecting the very core of western democratic processes. The digitization of society involves in…
Social Media and Trust in Scientific Expertise: Debating the Covid-19 Pandemic in The Netherlands
This article examines the role of social media dynamics in the public exchange of information between scientists (experts), government (policy-makers), mass media (journalists), and citizens (nonexperts) during the first 4 months after the Covid-19 outbreak in the Netherlands. Over the past decade, the institutional model of science communication, based on linear vectors of information flows between institutions, has gradually converted into a ne…
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.
Electronic identity services as sociotechnical and political-economic constructs
Electronic identification services (eIDs) have become strategic services in the global governance of online societies. In this article, we argue that eIDs are sociotechnical constructs that also have political-economic dimensions. In the European context, governmental and corporate efforts to develop eIDs are shaped by legal EU frameworks, which are almost exclusively focussed on technical and legal interoperability, such as the European Interope…
Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and ideology
Metadata and data have become a regular currency for citizens to pay for their communication services and security—a trade-off that has nestled into the comfort zone of most people. This article deconstructs the ideological grounds of datafication. Datafication is rooted in problematic ontological and epistemological claims. As part of a larger social media logic, it shows characteristics of a widespread secular belief. Dataism, as this convictio…
Users like you? Theorizing agency in user-generated content
You have one identity: Performing the self on Facebook and LinkedIn
Social media are popular stages for self-expression, communication and self-promotion. Rather than facilitating online identity formation, they are sites of struggle between users, employers and platform owners to control online identities - a struggle played out at the level of the interface. This article offers a comparative interface analysis between Facebook and LinkedIn. While Facebook is particularly focused on facilitating personal self-pr…
Digital photography: Communication, identity, memory
Taking photographs seems no longer primarily an act of memory intended to safeguard a family's pictorial heritage, but is increasingly becoming a tool for an individual's identity formation and communication. Digital cameras, cameraphones, photoblogs and other multipurpose devices are used to promote the use of images as the preferred idiom of a new generation of users. The aim of this article is to explore how technical changes (digitization) co…
Seeing the forest for the trees: Visualizing platformization and its governance
The complexities of platforms are increasingly at odds with the narrow legal and economic concepts in which their governance is grounded. This article aims to analyze platformization through the metaphorical lens of a tree to make sense of information ecosystems as hierarchical and interdependent structures. The layered shape of the tree draws attention to the dynamics of power concentration: vertical integration, infrastructuralization, and cros…
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…
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…
Wikinomics and its discontents: A critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos
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…
Record and Hold: Popular Music between Personal and Collective Memory
Recorded music is vital to the construction of personal and collective cultural memory. My examination of the interrelation between personal and collective memories of popular music assumes both that human memory is simultaneously embodied, enabled, and embedded, and that (re)collective experiences are constructed through narratives. Analysis of an online set of narrative responses to a national radio-event, the Dutch Top 2000, shows that we need…
Flickr and the culture of connectivity: Sharing views, experiences, memories
Photo sharing sites such as Flickr are commonly regarded either as spaces where communal views and experiences evolve as a result of picture exchange, or as visual archives where sharing pictures in the present naturally leads to a collective interpretation of the past. This article proposes regarding Flickr as a social media platform annex database that enables the construction of infinite connections. Platforms such as Flickr are firmly embedde…
Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices
The series Transformations in Art and Culture is dedicated to the study of historical and contemporary transformations in arts and culture, emphasizing processes of cultural change as they manifest themselves over time, through space, and in various media.Main goal of the series is to examine the effects of globalization, commercialization and technologization on the form, content, meaning and functioning of cultural products and socio-cultural p…
Mediated memories: Personal Cultural Memory as Object of Cultural Analysis
Like many people born in the 1950s and 1960s, I own a shoebox containing a variety of personal items signalling my personal past: photos, letters, diaries, and so on. In the course of several decad
Wisdom of the crowd or technicity of content? Wikipedia as a sociotechnical system
Wikipedia is often considered as an example of ‘collaborative knowledge’. Researchers have contested the value of Wikipedia content on various accounts. Some have disputed the ability of anonymous amateurs to produce quality information, while others have contested Wikipedia’s claim to accuracy and neutrality. Even if these concerns about Wikipedia as an encyclopaedic genre are relevant, they misguidedly focus on human agents only. Wikipedia’s ad…
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 …
Facebook as a Tool for Producing Sociality and Connectivity
This article investigates whether social media in general—using Facebook as an example—warrant identification of a new public sphere, another private sphere, or a different corporate sphere, as some scholars have argued. It is argued that social media platforms neither warrant a recalibration of Habermas’ public sphere, nor a conscious blending of spheres. Rather, social media platforms form a contested space where private, public and corporate i…
Deplatformization and the governance of the platform ecosystem
This article analyzes deplatformization as an implied governance strategy by major tech companies to detoxify the platform ecosystem of radical content while consolidating their power as designers, operators, and governors of that same ecosystem. Deplatformization is different from deplatforming: it entails a systemic effort to push back encroaching radical right-wing platforms to the fringes of the ecosystem by denying them the infrastructural s…
Rearticulating Audience Engagement: Social Media and Television
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…
Researching Social Media as if the Social Mattered
The institutions we have come to call 'media' have been involved for over a century in providing an infrastructure for social life and have invested in a quite particular and privileged way of re-presenting the world as 'social.' The dialectic between 'media' and 'social' has become more urgent to understand in an era when media and information infrastructures have expanded, converged, and become embedded more deeply in the texture of everyday li…
Social Media and Trust in Scientific Expertise: Debating the Covid-19 Pandemic in The Netherlands
This article examines the role of social media dynamics in the public exchange of information between scientists (experts), government (policy-makers), mass media (journalists), and citizens (nonexperts) during the first 4 months after the Covid-19 outbreak in the Netherlands. Over the past decade, the institutional model of science communication, based on linear vectors of information flows between institutions, has gradually converted into a ne…
After the “Two Cultures”: Toward a “(Multi)cultural” Practice of Science Communication
In his famous lecture “The Two Cultures” (1959), C. P. Snow identified an unbridgeable gap between two hostile branches of knowledge: the (natural) sciences and the humanities. The twocultures opposition has long dissolved since 1959. In the twenty-first century, the postmodern condition of science has given rise to the “(multi)cultural paradigm” of science communication—a paradigm beyond the two cultures and the narrativation of knowledge, ackno…
Sign Here: Handwriting in the Age of New Media
The series Transformations in Art and Culture is dedicated to the study of historical and contemporary transformations in arts and culture, emphasizing processes of cultural change as they manifest themselves over time, through space, and in various media.Main goal of the series is to examine the effects of globalization, commercialization and technologization on the form, content, meaning and functioning of cultural products and socio-cultural p…
Observe, inspect, modify: Three conditions for generative AI governance
In a world increasingly shaped by generative AI systems like ChatGPT, the absence of benchmarks to examine the efficacy of oversight mechanisms is a problem for research and policy. What are the structural conditions for governing generative AI systems? To answer this question, it is crucial to situate generative AI systems as regulatory objects: material items that can be governed. On this conceptual basis, we introduce three high-level conditio…
In data we trust? The implications of datafication for social monitoring
Today there is a remarkable tolerance for Big Brother and Big Business routinely accessing citizens’ personal information also known as Big Data. Part of the explanation for this may be found in the gradual normalization of datafication as a new paradigm in science and society. Datafication is becoming a leading principle, not just amongst techno-adepts, but also amongst scholars. This article deconstructs the ideological grounds of datafication …
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 …
Reading the human genome narrative
Imagenation: Popular Images of Genetics
Genetics seems more popular then ever. DNA technology not only sustains large areas of biomedicine and business, but also prevails in social and legal practices and takes root in cultural products. Si
Cloning humans, cloning literature: Genetics and the imagination deficit
After the birth of Dolly, media stories on cloning were replete with references to well-known science fiction plots. This essay criticizes the 'imagination deficit' of scientists and journalists, first by problematizing the uncritical adoption of attentuated science fiction plots in the media coverage of Dolly, and second, by proposing to look at more expansive science fiction novels that carefully examine issues such as uniqueness and identity i…
Digital cadavers: The visible human project as anatomical theater
Bodies without borders: The endoscopic gaze
The movie Fantastic Voyage (1966) is not an innocent science fiction fantasy but a trope that concurrently underlies the development and implementation of a particular medical imaging technique: the endoscope. Sketching the past, present and future of endoscopy, this article advances the broader argument that medical imaging techniques and media technologies are developed concurrently. The endoscopic gaze - the look from within the body - has gra…
Bodyworlds: The Art of Plastinated Cadavers
Configurations - Volume 9, Number 1, Winter 2001
Medical documentary: Conjoined twins as a mediated spectacle
The freak show, the public showing of misfits or wonders of nature, as various people have claimed, disappeared in the 20th century due to a changing mentality and growing medicalization in western society. Based on Michel Foucault’s and Guy Debord’s theories, the argument of this article is that the freak show has never disappeared but has transformed into a medicalized-mediated spectacle. Medical documentaries featuring the surgical separation …
After the “Two Cultures”: Toward a “(Multi)cultural” Practice of Science Communication
In his famous lecture “The Two Cultures” (1959), C. P. Snow identified an unbridgeable gap between two hostile branches of knowledge: the (natural) sciences and the humanities. The twocultures opposition has long dissolved since 1959. In the twenty-first century, the postmodern condition of science has given rise to the “(multi)cultural paradigm” of science communication—a paradigm beyond the two cultures and the narrativation of knowledge, ackno…
Mediated memories: Personal Cultural Memory as Object of Cultural Analysis
Like many people born in the 1950s and 1960s, I own a shoebox containing a variety of personal items signalling my personal past: photos, letters, diaries, and so on. In the course of several decad
Memory Matters in the Digital Age
Memory Matters in the Digital Age José van Dijck (bio) In the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the company Lacuna Inc. advertises its method for focused memory removal with the slogan: "Why remember a destructive love affair if you can erase it?"1 When Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) incidentally finds out that his ex-girlfriend Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslett) has undergone the Lacuna procedure to wipe their bitterly ended relationship…
From shoebox to performative agent: The computer as personal memory machine
Digital technologies offer new opportunities in the everyday lives of people: with still expanding memory capacities, the computer is rapidly becoming a giant storage and processing facility for recording and retrieving ‘bits of life’. Software engineers and companies promise not only to expand the capacity of personal memory infinitely, but even revolutionize its nature. Both in the past and recent years, the idea of a universal memory machine h…
Picturizing science: The science documentary as multimedia spectacle
At the turn of the millennium, science documentaries show a particular penchant for the abundant use of animated visuals, obviously facilitated by new digital television techniques such as videographic animation and computer animatronics. Analyzing two recent science documentary series ( Walking with Dinosaurs and The Elegant Universe) this article discusses how scientists and television producers deploy digital animation to convince viewers of t…
Sign Here: Handwriting in the Age of New Media
The series Transformations in Art and Culture is dedicated to the study of historical and contemporary transformations in arts and culture, emphasizing processes of cultural change as they manifest themselves over time, through space, and in various media.Main goal of the series is to examine the effects of globalization, commercialization and technologization on the form, content, meaning and functioning of cultural products and socio-cultural p…
Record and Hold: Popular Music between Personal and Collective Memory
Recorded music is vital to the construction of personal and collective cultural memory. My examination of the interrelation between personal and collective memories of popular music assumes both that human memory is simultaneously embodied, enabled, and embedded, and that (re)collective experiences are constructed through narratives. Analysis of an online set of narrative responses to a national radio-event, the Dutch Top 2000, shows that we need…
Mediated Memories in the Digital Age
Many people deploy photo media tools to document everyday events and rituals. For generations we have stored memories in albums, diaries, and shoeboxes to retrieve at a later moment in life. Autobiographical memory, its tools, and its objects are pressing concerns in most people’s everyday lives, and recent digital transformation cause many to reflect on the value and meaning of their own “mediated memories.” Digital photo cameras, camcorders, an…
Digital photography: Communication, identity, memory
Taking photographs seems no longer primarily an act of memory intended to safeguard a family's pictorial heritage, but is increasingly becoming a tool for an individual's identity formation and communication. Digital cameras, cameraphones, photoblogs and other multipurpose devices are used to promote the use of images as the preferred idiom of a new generation of users. The aim of this article is to explore how technical changes (digitization) co…
Users like you? Theorizing agency in user-generated content
Future Memories: The Construction of Cinematic Hindsight
of urgency. The children's motivation for being filmed betrays a sophisticated reflexivity of the camcorder as a tool for producing future memories. Even at a young age, children keenly apprehend the pliability of mediated experience; their father's film is not simply a registration of present fun activities, but a conscious steering of their future past. The camcorder constructs family life at the same time and by the same means as it constructs…
Wikinomics and its discontents: A critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos
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…
Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices
The series Transformations in Art and Culture is dedicated to the study of historical and contemporary transformations in arts and culture, emphasizing processes of cultural change as they manifest themselves over time, through space, and in various media.Main goal of the series is to examine the effects of globalization, commercialization and technologization on the form, content, meaning and functioning of cultural products and socio-cultural p…
Flickr and the culture of connectivity: Sharing views, experiences, memories
Photo sharing sites such as Flickr are commonly regarded either as spaces where communal views and experiences evolve as a result of picture exchange, or as visual archives where sharing pictures in the present naturally leads to a collective interpretation of the past. This article proposes regarding Flickr as a social media platform annex database that enables the construction of infinite connections. Platforms such as Flickr are firmly embedde…
Wisdom of the crowd or technicity of content? Wikipedia as a sociotechnical system
Wikipedia is often considered as an example of ‘collaborative knowledge’. Researchers have contested the value of Wikipedia content on various accounts. Some have disputed the ability of anonymous amateurs to produce quality information, while others have contested Wikipedia’s claim to accuracy and neutrality. Even if these concerns about Wikipedia as an encyclopaedic genre are relevant, they misguidedly focus on human agents only. Wikipedia’s ad…
Search engines and the production of academic knowledge
This article argues that search engines in general, and Google Scholar in particular, have become significant co-producers of academic knowledge. Knowledge is not simply conveyed to users, but is co-produced by search engines’ ranking systems and profiling systems, none of which are open to the rules of transparency, relevance and privacy in a manner known from library scholarship in the public domain. Inexperienced users tend to trust proprietar…
Tracing Twitter: The rise of a microblogging platform
This article uses ‘interpretative flexibility’ as a concept to analyse the early development of one specific microblogging site: Twitter. By tracing microblogging’s instable meaning in its early years (2006–10), we try to understand how the platform’s meaning was shaped by a variety of human and non-human actors: technological design, usage, content and business models. By tracking microblogging’s instable meaning in its infant years, we may get …
Facebook as a Tool for Producing Sociality and Connectivity
This article investigates whether social media in general—using Facebook as an example—warrant identification of a new public sphere, another private sphere, or a different corporate sphere, as some scholars have argued. It is argued that social media platforms neither warrant a recalibration of Habermas’ public sphere, nor a conscious blending of spheres. Rather, social media platforms form a contested space where private, public and corporate i…
Sociology (43 works) · Computer Science (39 works) · Political science (37 works) · Law (23 works) · Public relations (22 works) · Politics (18 works) · Social Media and Politics (17 works) · Art (13 works) · Business (13 works) · Psychology (13 works)