Platform
Society

A platform organises the meeting—and helps write its rules.

A student opens an app to travel to college, watches a recommended news clip, orders lunch and submits an assignment through a learning service. Each activity feels separate. Behind the screen, however, interfaces, rankings, payment systems and data records organise how the activity takes place.

The ride depends on matching rules. The news clip gains visibility through selection. The food order connects a customer, restaurant and delivery worker. The assignment becomes a record that teachers and administrators can sort and assess.

The concept connects everyday convenience with institutional change. It asks how the systems through which people communicate, work and obtain services distribute opportunities, collect data and establish authority.

From an app to a social arrangement

Think of a marketplace whose operator designs the entrance, allocates stalls, arranges the directory, processes payments and sets the conditions for remaining inside. Participants bring the goods, services and conversation. The operator helps organise their encounters.

A digital platform can perform these tasks through software at a large scale. Its decisions enter the conditions under which a seller finds customers, a creator reaches viewers or a worker receives an assignment.

Why communication studies needs this concept

Platforms help determine how messages circulate, which speakers gain visibility and how audiences become valuable to advertisers and other organisations. They also supply tools through which people collaborate, build communities and create livelihoods.

Study these possibilities together: what does participation enable, how is it organised, and who can shape the terms? That question will guide this chapter.

Connect technical arrangements with markets, institutions and public life.

José van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal develop the framework in The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World (2018). Their account examines the relationship between online platforms and societal structures, with public values at the centre of the inquiry. Read the book record ↓

Their approach moves between individual platforms, their interdependent ecosystem and wider questions of governance. It brings companies, governments and civil society into the same discussion: who should help anchor the common good within systems used for everyday life?

Platformisation as a process

Poell, David Nieborg and van Dijck (2019) examine platformisation through infrastructures, markets and governance, alongside changing cultural practices. This gives the researcher a way to follow change through a particular setting. Read the open-access article ↓

Suppose a local publication begins producing stories for a distribution service. Its formats, advertising arrangements, analytics and editorial routines may all change. Platformisation concerns that connected reorganisation.

Platform capitalism as a political-economic account

Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism (2017) places platform businesses within the history and competitive pressures of capitalism. It directs attention to data, network effects, ownership and the tendency towards concentration. Read the publisher record ↓

Read these approaches together. The platform society framework foregrounds institutions and public values; political economy investigates the business relationships and ownership structures through which platform power grows.

The visible interface rests on a wider arrangement of services and rules.

An online platform brings software, economic organisation and participation into a working relationship. Studying its architecture means examining how these elements fit together.

Six entry points for analysis

• Data: what is recorded, linked, retained and inferred?
• Algorithms: how are matching, ordering, recommendation or assessment organised?
• Interfaces: which actions are made easy, prominent or difficult to find?
• Ownership: who controls the service and its important dependencies?
• Business model: how does the arrangement generate income or secure resources?
• Terms and policies: what conditions govern access, participation and disputes?

For example, placing a share button beside a video makes recirculation easy. A dashboard that highlights watch time directs attention towards one measure of success. A payment condition can determine which sellers are able to participate.

Values take practical form in these choices. A service can reward rapid response, provide space for explanation or make assistance easy to obtain. Each choice helps establish what the arrangement recognises and supports.

Infrastructural and sectoral roles

Sectoral platforms organise activities in fields such as transport, news or education. Infrastructural services supply capabilities used across fields. Their interdependence helps explain why changing one service can affect several others.

Plantin, Lagoze, Edwards and Sandvig (2018) connect platform studies with infrastructure studies. Their approach examines how platforms acquire infrastructural characteristics and how infrastructures become reorganised through platform arrangements. Read the article record ↓

Ownership and participation

Map who can set conditions and who must adapt to them. A small publisher may choose its reporting priorities while relying on another organisation for distribution, analytics and advertising access. That combination joins creative agency with infrastructural dependence.

The same map can reveal bargaining resources: a direct audience relationship, alternative distribution, collective organisation or an institution’s ability to negotiate service conditions.

Datafication, commodification and selection connect activity with value and visibility.

The platform society framework identifies three mechanisms through which platform arrangements take shape. They operate together: activity becomes data, interactions acquire economic value and systems select what participants encounter.

Datafication: turning activity into records

A video service can record a play, its duration, a pause, a search and the route through which a viewer arrived. A transport service can record a request, a location, a journey and a rating. These records make activity available for calculation.

Datafication also involves choices about categories. A completed journey, a satisfied customer and a successful learning encounter require definitions before they become dashboard entries.

Consider a student who repeatedly watches statistics tutorials. The system might infer an interest in quantitative research. The student could instead be helping a friend, revising one topic or sharing the device. Interpretation enters when records become a profile.

Commodification: converting participation into economic opportunities

A platform may sell advertising opportunities, charge a commission, collect a subscription or rent access to infrastructure. The economic object varies with the service.

In an advertising arrangement, a purchaser may pay to reach a selected audience. Data can help define that audience, predict responses and measure outcomes. In a transaction service, revenue may arise from facilitating a booking or payment.

Trace the whole exchange: who pays, what is purchased, who supplies the activity and how value is distributed among the participants.

Selection: organising the field of possible encounters

Selection includes personal recommendations, ranked search results, trending lists, reputation scores and moderation. Each makes some content, people or services easier to encounter.

A recommendation may combine earlier activity with the characteristics of available material and the service’s objectives. A rating can influence whether a seller receives another order. A moderation decision can determine whether an account continues to participate.

Read the mechanisms together

Suppose a cooking video gains visibility after viewers watch and share it. Those actions become signals. Selection gives it further exposure, while advertising or paid services may turn the encounter into income.

Follow the connections among the record, the decision and the exchange. This reveals how a platform joins communication with its commercial and institutional arrangements.

A platform coordinates several groups whose participation can affect one another.

Many platforms organise a multisided market. A video service may connect viewers, creators and advertisers; a delivery service may connect customers, restaurants and workers.

Each group contributes something the others seek. The platform sets prices, incentives and participation conditions across these relationships. Work on two-sided markets by Rochet and Tirole (2003) provides an important economic foundation for analysing them. Read the article record ↓

Direct and cross-side network effects

A direct network effect arises when participation by others in the same group affects a user’s experience. A communication service can become more useful when more of the people someone wishes to contact join it.

A cross-side network effect operates between groups. More restaurants can make a delivery service attractive to customers; more customers can make it attractive to restaurants.

The relationship depends on who joins and what the service enables. Crowding, unwanted messages, poor quality or competition among sellers can change how participants experience growth.

Pricing one side to attract another

A service may subsidise participation by one group and obtain revenue from another. For example, a low entry price can attract viewers whose attention makes advertising opportunities valuable.

This helps explain why the visible price paid by an individual gives only part of the economic picture. Examine the relationships among all participating groups.

Srnicek’s five platform types

Srnicek distinguishes advertising platforms, cloud platforms, industrial platforms, product platforms and lean platforms. The categories identify different routes through which data, services and intermediation enter a business model.

• Advertising: organise data and audiences around advertising markets.
• Cloud: provide rented computing or software capabilities.
• Industrial: connect and organise industrial processes.
• Product: offer access to products through service arrangements.
• Lean: coordinate transactions while relying heavily on assets supplied by participants.

Switching costs and competitive advantage

A seller who leaves a service may have to rebuild a customer base, reviews and working routines. A college changing its learning system may need to move records, retrain staff and replace integrations. These are switching costs.

Network effects, accumulated data and infrastructural dependencies can strengthen an established position. Multihoming—using more than one service—can give participants alternatives, while portability and interoperability can make movement easier.

Rules become consequential through the decisions a system makes.

Algorithmic governance concerns the ways computational procedures help organise conduct, visibility, access and allocation. It connects technical decisions with the authority to set and enforce conditions of participation.

Follow one decision: a recommendation, a search position, a work assignment or an account restriction. Ask which data enter it, which objective guides it, who can review it and what happens afterwards.

Personalisation and recommendation

Personalisation adjusts a service to a person, profile or situation. A recommendation system can arrange material according to estimates of relevance or likely response.

The practical question is what the system seeks to achieve. A service might prioritise completion, repeated use, purchases or another defined outcome. Each objective gives a different meaning to a successful recommendation.

Trending and collective visibility

A trending list turns selected patterns of activity into a public signal of momentum. Its construction may involve a time window, a baseline, a location and rules for excluding certain activity.

Study the procedure and the response it invites. A publisher may produce follow-up material when a topic appears prominent; users may join the conversation because the list makes it visible.

Reputation and ratings

Reputation systems turn evaluations into scores, labels or rankings. These can help strangers decide whom to trust, while also shaping the behaviour of those being evaluated.

A delivery worker may alter a routine to protect a rating. A customer may hesitate to leave criticism if a reciprocal evaluation is expected. Examine who rates whom, which experiences the score captures and how a disputed assessment can be addressed.

Moderation and participation

Moderation establishes boundaries around content and conduct. It can involve automated detection, reporting tools, human review and appeals. Decisions may affect a single item, an account or a wider community.

Tarleton Gillespie’s Custodians of the Internet (2018) places these decisions at the centre of social media’s organisation. His work connects moderation policies and practices with their consequences for public discourse and cultural participation. Read the publisher record ↓

People respond to the system

Creators, workers and users develop ideas about how a service works. They adjust timing, wording, presentation and activity in the hope of being recognised or rewarded.

Taina Bucher’s If...Then (2018) offers a situated approach to algorithmic power. It helps direct attention towards the relationships among computational arrangements, everyday practices and people’s experience of visibility. Read the book record ↓

A careful analysis therefore follows the system’s documented arrangements alongside participants’ accounts. What people believe about a ranking can matter to their conduct, even while its technical operation remains an empirical question.

Platforms enter the making of media as well as its distribution.

A news organisation can use a platform to reach audiences, sell advertising, host video, measure response and communicate with sources. Each connection can influence working routines and decisions about what to produce.

Distribution and audience relationships

Platforms can bring local reporting to people who would otherwise miss it. They can also place a publisher’s reach within a distribution arrangement controlled by another organisation.

Suppose a Bengali neighbourhood publication reaches readers through a recommended feed. A change in how that feed selects material can alter the publication’s visibility, even when its reporting priorities remain steady.

Metrics and editorial judgement

Audience measures help journalists discover questions, improve presentation and assess whether work reaches its intended readers. A dashboard can also make particular forms of response especially prominent.

Watch time, clicks and shares each capture a different aspect of activity. Editorial judgement connects those measures with accuracy, public importance, context and the needs of the community.

Consider a civic investigation with modest immediate traffic and a short entertainment clip with rapid sharing. A newsroom can compare their audience patterns while examining their different journalistic purposes.

Formats, timing and continuous revision

Distribution conditions can encourage particular durations, aspect ratios, posting rhythms and headlines. Producers may revise a work repeatedly as feedback arrives.

Nieborg and Poell (2018) describe the contingent cultural commodity: cultural content that becomes modular and continually reworked within platform relationships and datafied feedback. Their analysis follows news and games to examine changing production, distribution and circulation. Read the article record ↓

Creativity and collaboration

Platforms can connect collaborators, make work discoverable and provide routes to audience support. An illustrator can share a portfolio; a musician can circulate a performance; a research group can work on a shared project.

These opportunities are organised through specific conditions. Examine ownership of the work, access to audiences, fees, attribution and the continuity of the service on which the project relies.

Editorial autonomy as an institutional resource

A publication can develop direct audience relationships, several distribution routes and an explicit account of editorial priorities. These arrangements can help it evaluate platform opportunities against its own purposes.

The analytical task is to trace an actual decision: which measure or rule entered it, how staff interpreted that input and what changed in the resulting work.

Digital coordination can open work while redistributing control and risk.

Platform-mediated work connects people seeking tasks, services or audiences with those able to provide them. It includes local delivery and transport, remote assignments and several forms of creative production.

The arrangement can reduce search costs, widen a client base and provide flexibility over participation. Its value to workers also depends on income, expenses, stability and the authority to influence working conditions.

Algorithmic management

Algorithmic management concerns the use of computational systems to coordinate, monitor or evaluate work. Matching, task allocation, ratings and automated assessments can enter a worker’s daily routine.

Suppose a delivery service assigns jobs through location and acceptance history. Investigate how the worker encounters that arrangement: what information appears, how much time is available to decide and what follows from accepting or declining.

Follow the working day

A meaningful account of earnings includes the time and resources needed to earn them. Consider waiting, travel between tasks, equipment, connectivity and other costs alongside the amount received.

For example, compare paid task time with the whole period a worker makes available to the service. That comparison can reveal where participants absorb uncertainty and expense.

Ratings, access and continuity

Reputation can become an important resource for securing future work. A disputed rating or account restriction may therefore affect a livelihood as well as a single transaction.

Examine the reasons supplied, access to relevant records and the route through which a person can seek review. These procedures shape how workers experience authority.

Creators and audience-dependent income

A creator may combine advertising, sponsorship, subscriptions and commissioned work. The audience relationship can carry both creative opportunity and pressure to maintain visibility.

Study the labour behind the public performance: preparation, editing, audience interaction and the effort spent responding to analytics. Different forms of platform work distribute time, costs and control in different ways.

Voice and collective organisation

Workers and creators can exchange information, organise collectively and develop alternative services. Their ability to negotiate depends on resources such as shared knowledge, an established audience and viable routes to market.

Record the relevant contractual arrangement, local setting and allocation of responsibilities when comparing cases. This gives the analysis a concrete account of who controls what.

Public purposes travel into the design of the service.

Platforms can help coordinate services, extend access and connect people with information. When an institution relies on them, questions about public responsibility also enter the arrangement.

Education: learning becomes a recorded pathway

A learning service can bring lectures, assignments, discussion and assessment into one place. It can support students who need flexibility and help teachers identify where assistance is required.

Its categories also help define what the institution can see. Completion, time spent and submitted work may become prominent measures of engagement.

Suppose a student downloads material, studies offline and later discusses it in class. Examine how the institution recognises this learning alongside the service’s recorded activity. Pedagogical judgement gives the measures their educational meaning.

Transport: matching enters the organisation of a city

A transport platform can reduce the effort involved in locating a service, estimating arrival and arranging payment. Its matching and pricing arrangements can also affect where work is available and which journeys are attractive to providers.

Follow the relationship among passenger convenience, worker conditions, coverage and the wider transport network. Public evaluation can ask how the service contributes to mobility across different neighbourhoods and times.

Health: coordination meets sensitive information

A digital service can help people arrange appointments, find information or communicate with a provider. Its usefulness rests partly on trust in how information and responsibilities are handled.

A public-value inquiry examines who can access records, how purposes are defined, how accuracy is maintained and which routes remain available to people who need assistance.

Institutions retain design choices

A college or public service can examine data requirements, accessibility, procurement conditions, staff support and continuity before adopting a system. The service relationship should express the institution’s purpose through concrete procedures.

For research, compare the public promise with actual use. Hear from participants who encounter the service under different conditions, including those who depend on assisted or offline routes.

The common good becomes concrete through design, ownership and accountability.

Public values provide criteria for evaluating how a platform arrangement serves a community. They concern both the experience of individuals and the wider organisation of access, responsibility and democratic life.

Privacy and surveillance

Data collection can support coordination and personalisation. Its purpose, extent and distribution of control matter to the people whose activity becomes recorded.

Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) develops a critique of economic arrangements that turn human experience into data for prediction and commercial advantage. Her account directs attention towards information asymmetries and the power to shape behaviour. Read the publisher record ↓

Apply the question to a defined service: which records are needed for its stated purpose, which additional uses occur and what influence participants have over those uses.

Governance by platforms

Platforms govern through participation conditions, interfaces, technical standards and enforcement. A rule about acceptable content or access to data can reshape what another organisation is able to do.

Governance of platforms

Governments, public institutions, professional bodies, workers and civic organisations can influence how platforms operate. The available arrangements include oversight, negotiated conditions, collective voice and public participation.

For evaluation, ask who can identify a problem, obtain information, seek a remedy and help change the procedure. Accountability connects a stated principle with someone able to act.

Making trade-offs visible

A service may seek both convenient personalisation and limited data collection. A community may value open participation alongside protection from harassment. These purposes require choices about procedures and resources.

State the values involved, identify whose experience is affected and examine alternative designs. An explanation becomes stronger when it shows how the decision serves its purpose and how its consequences can be reviewed.

Ownership as a design question

Trebor Scholz’s work on platform cooperativism examines democratic ownership and governance as routes to organising digital services. It opens questions about who holds decision rights and how the benefits of participation are shared. Read the report ↓

Corporate, public and cooperative arrangements can be assessed through their funding, technical capacity, inclusion, accountability and ability to sustain a useful service. Ownership changes the decision structure; everyday practices show how that structure works.

Use the framework to explain a particular configuration of power.

The platform society approach joins technical arrangements with economic interests and public responsibilities. This helps communication research examine a service as part of an institutional setting.

What the approach brings into view

• It connects the visible interface with data, ownership, infrastructure and rules.
• It explains how participation can create opportunities while building dependencies.
• It places public values inside questions about design and governance.
• It supplies mechanisms that researchers can trace through a particular practice.

Agency and variation

Users interpret recommendations, journalists defend editorial purposes, workers exchange knowledge and institutions negotiate service conditions. Their actions help shape what a platform becomes in practice.

Compare settings with different resources and histories. The same feature may acquire a different significance for a professional creator, a small civic group and a public institution.

Unequal participation

Connectivity, devices, skills, language, time and accessibility influence who can benefit from a service. A service designed around frequent smartphone use may fit some participants’ lives more easily than others.

Investigate participation and its surrounding conditions together. Hear from people who use assisted routes, share devices or choose other arrangements.

Material and geographical foundations

Platforms operate through servers, energy, devices, logistics and human labour. Their services also encounter local languages, institutions and markets.

A study of circulation can follow these foundations: where work is performed, who owns the infrastructure and how local organisations adapt the service to their purposes.

Turn a broad claim into a researchable argument

Choose an activity, identify the platform relationships involved and locate the decision you want to explain. Then gather evidence about the mechanism and its consequences.

For example, investigate how a publication uses analytics in story selection. Compare meeting records, staff accounts, audience measures and published work. This gives the claim a visible path from observation to explanation.

Follow the mechanism into a decision and its consequences.

These cases connect the chapter’s concepts with bounded questions. In each, locate the participants, examine the records and rules, and identify the public purpose at stake.

A common route through the cases

1. Describe the encounter: who is trying to do what?
2. Map the arrangement: which service, infrastructure and organisation make it possible?
3. Trace the mechanisms: what becomes data, where does value arise and how is access or visibility arranged?
4. Locate responsibility: who sets the condition and who can review it?
5. Build the explanation: connect the evidence with the claim and consider alternative accounts.

A useful analysis shows a relationship at work. It can then explain what a different procedure might change and how that proposal could be evaluated.

Connect the everyday encounter with the platform arrangement behind it.

In my lecture, Platform Society Explained, I introduce the role of platforms in economic, social and cultural life. Watch with the three mechanisms in mind, then connect them with a service you use.

Watch my lecture on YouTube ↗

After viewing

Choose one platform-mediated activity. Write three short explanations: how it becomes data, how it enters an economic arrangement and how selection organises the encounter. Then identify a public value that matters in that setting.

Test the connection between a concept and the relationship it explains.

Choose one answer for each question. State the reason for your choice before opening the explanation.

Build an explanation around a service, a decision and appropriate evidence.

A focused platform study connects the visible experience with the arrangements that organise it. Begin with a question narrow enough to investigate.

Activity 1 · Audit an everyday platform encounter

Choose an activity such as finding a news story, booking a service or submitting coursework. Record the public-facing steps and the information available at each point.

1. Map the participants: identify users, providers, workers, advertisers and relevant institutions.
2. Map the infrastructure: note visible dependencies such as login, payments, hosting or app distribution.
3. Trace datafication: identify the information supplied, recorded or inferred where this is documented.
4. Trace commodification: examine payment, advertising, subscriptions or another resource arrangement.
5. Trace selection: describe ranking, matching, ratings, moderation or other access decisions.
6. Assess a public value: identify the procedure that would support privacy, accessibility, fairness or accountability.

Activity 2 · Compare two routes to the same goal

Compare two ways to obtain a similar result: a platform feed and a publication’s own site, two learning arrangements, or a platform booking and a direct booking.

Examine effort, cost, information, visibility and the ability to seek assistance. Explain which circumstances make each route useful and which responsibilities the arrangement assigns to participants.

Research extension · Choose evidence for the claim

Document the conditions of observation

Record the date, device, account conditions, search terms and relevant settings. Keep the materials needed to show how the analysis developed.

When working with participants, obtain informed participation and protect personal information. Ask for accounts of relevant experiences and preserve their context in reporting.

Assess an improvement

A recommendation becomes useful when it identifies a responsible actor, a changed procedure and an observable result. For example, a college might add a student explanation process to dashboard-based follow-up, then examine whether support reaches students studying through different routes.

State the purpose of the change, the resources it requires and how participants can report problems. This connects a public value with a procedure that can be reviewed.

Examination and seminar prompts

• Explain platform society through a service you encounter in daily life.
• Distinguish datafication, commodification and selection using one connected example.
• Discuss network effects, multisided markets and switching costs.
• Examine how platformisation can reshape journalism or cultural production.
• Assess opportunities and challenges in platform-mediated work.
• Design a public-value assessment of an educational or other institutional platform.

Keep the concepts connected with the relationships they help explain.

Use the glossary to revise the chapter, then follow the readings into the arguments and studies behind the concepts.

Digital platform

A programmable arrangement that organises interactions among people, organisations or services.

Platform society

A social order increasingly organised through connected digital platforms and infrastructures.

Platformisation

The expansion of platform infrastructures, markets and governance into sectors and cultural practices.

Platform capitalism

The organisation of platform business models within capitalist competition and accumulation.

Platform ecosystem

Interdependent platforms and services operating through connected technical, economic and governance arrangements.

Infrastructural service

A capability, such as hosting or payments, that can support activities across several services or sectors.

Sectoral platform

A platform organising activity in a field such as transport, commerce, news or education.

Datafication

Rendering activity and relationships into data for recording, processing and comparison.

Inferred data

Information estimated from other records or signals through a classification or predictive procedure.

Commodification

The organisation of activities, relationships or resources as objects of economic exchange.

Selection

The organisation of visibility and access through ranking, recommendation, matching, evaluation or moderation.

Personalisation

The adjustment of a service or its presentation to a person, profile or situation.

Multisided market

An arrangement connecting several participating groups whose activities can affect one another.

Direct network effect

An effect of participation by others in the same group on a user’s experience of a service.

Cross-side network effect

An effect of participation on one side of a platform arrangement on another side.

Switching cost

The effort or resources required to move to another service or arrangement.

Multihoming

Participation in more than one service serving a similar purpose.

Interoperability

The capacity of systems or services to work with one another under defined arrangements.

Data portability

The capacity to obtain and move relevant data in a usable form.

Algorithmic governance

The organisation of conduct, visibility, access or allocation through computational procedures and their governing arrangements.

Algorithmic management

The use of computational systems to coordinate, monitor or evaluate work.

Content moderation

The processes through which rules about content and conduct are interpreted and enforced.

Contingent cultural commodity

Cultural content continually adapted and reworked within platform relationships and datafied feedback.

Public values

Criteria concerning collective welfare, rights, inclusion, accountability and democratic life.

Platform cooperativism

An approach to digital services centred on cooperative ownership and democratic governance.

Core and further readings

1. van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & de Waal, M. (2018). The platform society: Public values in a connective world. Oxford University Press. Source record ↗

   The central framework connecting platform mechanisms, institutions and public values.

2. Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. Polity. Source record ↗

   A political-economic account of platform business models and their competitive dynamics.

3. Poell, T., Nieborg, D., & van Dijck, J. (2019). Platformisation. Internet Policy Review, 8(4). Source record ↗

   An open-access conceptual account linking infrastructures, markets, governance and cultural practices.

4. Nieborg, D. B., & Poell, T. (2018). The platformization of cultural production: Theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. New Media & Society, 20(11), 4275–4292. Source record ↗

   Examines cultural production, datafied feedback and dependence through news and games.

5. Plantin, J.-C., Lagoze, C., Edwards, P. N., & Sandvig, C. (2018). Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook. New Media & Society, 20(1), 293–310. Source record ↗

   Connects platform arrangements with the study of infrastructure.

6. Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. Yale University Press. Source record ↗

   A study of moderation decisions and their significance for social media and public discourse.

7. Bucher, T. (2018). If...then: Algorithmic power and politics. Oxford University Press. Source record ↗

   A situated approach to algorithms, visibility and everyday experience.

8. Rochet, J.-C., & Tirole, J. (2003). Platform competition in two-sided markets. Journal of the European Economic Association, 1(4), 990–1029. Source record ↗

   An influential economic model of platform competition and the organisation of market sides.

9. Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs. Source record ↗

   Examines prediction, data extraction and the concentration of knowledge and power.

10. Scholz, T. (2016). Platform cooperativism: Challenging the corporate sharing economy. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, New York Office. Source record ↗

    Develops cooperative ownership and democratic governance as questions for the digital economy.

My lecture: Platform Society Explained ↗

The chapter in six statements

1. Platforms organise interactions through connected technical, economic and governance arrangements.
2. Platform society examines how those arrangements become entangled with social institutions and everyday life.
3. Datafication, commodification and selection connect participation with records, value and visibility.
4. Network effects and infrastructural dependencies can influence opportunity, competition and bargaining power.
5. Users, workers, organisations and public institutions help shape how platforms operate in practice.
6. Public values become actionable through design choices, identifiable responsibility and procedures that can be reviewed.