José Van Dijck

• University of Amsterdam

When we (my co-authors Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal) published The Platform Society. Public Values in a Connective World in 2018, the field of “platform studies” had just started to emerge. In our book, we tried to explain how platformization had started to affect entire sectors, exemplified by the news industry, urban transport, health care, a...

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: m...

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” brand- ing. We examine how livestreaming platforms transform the labor process of rural produce sel...

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...

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...

El presente artículo contextualiza, define y operativiza el concepto de plataformización. A partir de reflexiones sobre las plataformas desde diversas perspectivas académicas ⎯los estudios de software, la crítica de la economía política, los estudios empresariales y los estudios culturales⎯ desarrolla un enfoque integral para este proceso. La plata...

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 Mic...

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 encroachin...

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 atte...

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 p...

This article contextualises, defines, and operationalises the concept of platformisation. Drawing insights from different scholarly perspectives on platforms-software studies, critical political economy, business studies, and cultural studies-it develops a comprehensive approach to this process. Platformisation is defined as the penetration of infr...

This paper examines how platform power is operationalized in the specific case of the iOS App Store. We take a first step in developing an analytical framework that critically examines the infrastructural power relations that constitute online platform ecosystems. Building on a relational understanding of power, we propose an analytical vocabulary...

This paper examines how platform power is operationalized in the specific case of app stores. We take a first step in developing an analytical framework that critically examines the infrastructural power relations that constitute online platform ecosystems. This involves distinguishing among different levels of platform ecosystem analysis.

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 ar...

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 w...

This special issue of Internet Policy Review is the second to bring together the best policy-oriented papers presented at the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). The conference in Montréal, in October 2018, was organised around the theme of "Transnational materialities". As explained in the editorial to this issue,...

Individuals all over the world can use Airbnb to rent an apartment in a foreign city, check Coursera to find a course on statistics, join PatientsLikeMe to exchange information about one’s disease, hail a cab using Uber, or read the news through Facebook’s Instant Articles. In The Platform Society, Van Dijck, Poell, and De Waal offer a comprehensiv...

Scientific research in the Netherlands is doing remarkably well. Dutch researchers, universities and institutes reside at or near the top of international rankings. In this essay, José van Dijck and Wim van Saarloos, the president and vice-president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), explore how such a small country could...

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-a...

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-dr...

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 nation...

This introduction to the special section on the construction of public space in social media activism discusses (1) the types of social media practices involved in the construction of publicness during contemporary episodes of popular contention, (2) the particular political institutional contexts in which these practices are articulated, and (3) t...

Search engines in general, and Google Scholar in particular, are co-producers of academic knowledge. They have a profound impact on the way knowledge is generated, transmitted, and distributed. This chapter first explores how Google Scholar works as a human-technological system in order to analyze the site's technology in combination with its inscr...

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...

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...

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 inf...

Since 2012, platforms for massive open online courses (MOOCs), such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX, have had a considerable impact on established forms of higher education, both online and off-line, private and public. What are the technocommercial and sociocultural dynamics underlying the organization of MOOCs? This article first describes how MOOC...

With the borders between technological, cultural, and political organization becoming increasingly fluid, there is more need than ever to rearticulate the relationship between “social,” “media,” and “society.”

While the rise of social media has made activists much less dependent on television and mainstream newspapers, this certainly does not mean that activists have more control over the media environments in which they operate. Media power has neither been transferred to the public, nor to activists for that matter; instead, power has partly shifted to...

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 mor...

Over the past years, social media and its users have become central actors in the production and dissemination of news. Various prominent media and journalism scholars have argued that this entails a democratization of the news process and can enhance independent journalism. This chapter enters into a critical dialogue with this popular idea. It ar...

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 so...

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, w...

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, w...

This article aims to explain how Web 2.0 platforms in general, and Facebook in particular, engineers online connections. Connectivity has become the material and metaphorical wiring of our culture, a culture in which technologies shape and are shaped not only by economic and legal frames, but also by users and content. The emergence of social media...

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 be...

This book studies the rise of social media in the first decade of the twenty-first century, up until 2012. It provides both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of networking services in the context of a changing ecosystem of connective media. Such history is needed to understand how the intricate constellation of platforms profoun...

Search engines in general, and Google Scholar in particular, are co-producers of academic knowledge. They have a profound impact on the way knowledge is generated, transmitted, and distributed. This chapter first explores how Google Scholar works as a human-technological system in order to analyze the site’s technology in combination with its inscr...

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...

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, conten...

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 databas...

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...

• 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 ma...

The migration of newspapers to a digital domain The migration of newspapers to a digital domain The decline of newspapers has caused academics to study its problematic migration from an analogue to a digital environment. Yet while the need for change has become pressingly urgent, news organizations often tend to focus on dwindling circulation as a...

JOSE VAN DIJCK The migration of newspapers to a digital domain The decline of newspapers has caused academics to study its problematic migration from an analogue to a digital environment. Yet while the need for change has become pressingly urgent, news organizations often tend to focus on dwindling circulation as a mere economic or technical proble...

'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 compan...

With the emergence of user-generated content platforms, 'users' are typically referred to as active, engaged and creative contributors of content, as illustrated by new hybrid terms such as 'produsers' or 'co-creators'. This article explores user agency as a complex concept, involving not only the user's cultural role as a facilitator of civic enga...

The layered concept of cinematic hindsight becomes more significant as the incorporation of personal home videos in public film or television productions gains a new dimension in light of recent technological transformations, particularly digitization. The concept can be theorized from two seemingly divergent perspectives. Following Gilles Deleuze...

Taking photographs seems no longer primarily an act of memory intended to safeguard 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 seem to promote the use of images a the preferred idiom of a new gener...

An old friend recently admitted, with a sense of understatement, that the size of his personal digital collection had outpaced his ability to keep track of its contents. Since acquiring a digital photo camera and a scanner in 1995, he had taken, stored, and scanned well over a hundred thousand pictures of his daily life, work, and family. His colle...

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 re...

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...

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...

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 r...

In dem Sciencefiction-Film Fantastic Voyage (Fantastische Reise) aus dem Jahr 1966 begibt sich eine Gruppe von drei Männern und einer Frau (Raquel Welch) auf eine spezielle Mission.1 Sie betreten eine Raumkapsel, die auf Miniaturgröße zusammengeschrumpft und dann in die Vene eines anästhesierten Patienten injiziert wird — eines berühmten Atomphysik...

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?" When Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) incidentally finds out that his ex-girlfriend Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslett) has undergone the Lacuna procedu...

Can lifelogs and blogging be considered the digital counterpart of what used to be paper diaries and diary writing? This article examines three dimensions of this phenomenon in conjunction: the diary/lifelog as a cultural form or genre, as a material and technological object, and as cultural practice. Tracing the transformation of personal logs in...

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” o...