Individuals all over the world can use Airbnb to rent an apartment in a foreign city, check Coursera to find a course on statistics, join PatientsLikeMe to exchange information about one’s disease, hail a cab using Uber, or read the news through Facebook’s Instant Articles. In The Platform Society, Van Dijck, Poell, and De Waal offer a comprehensive analysis of a connective world where platforms have penetrated the heart of societies—disrupting markets and labor relations, transforming social and civic practices, and affecting democratic processes. The Platform Society analyzes intense struggles between competing ideological systems and contesting societal actors—market, government, and civil society—asking who is or should be responsible for anchoring public values and the common good in a platform society. Public values include, of course, privacy, accuracy, safety, and security; but they also pertain to broader societal effects, such as fairness, accessibility, democratic control, and accountability. Such values are the very stakes in the struggle over the platformization of societies around the globe. The Platform Society highlights how these struggles play out in four private and public sectors: news, urban transport, health, and education. Some of these conflicts highlight local dimensions, for instance, fights over regulation between individual platforms and city councils, while others address the geopolitical level where power clashes between global markets and (supra-)national governments take place.

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 conviction is called, is so successful because masses of people — naively or unwittingly — trust their personal information to corporate platforms. The notion of trust becomes more problematic because people’s faith is extended to other public institutions (e.g. academic research and law enforcement) that handle their (meta)data. The interlocking of government, business, and academia in the adaptation of this ideology makes us want to look more critically at the entire ecosystem of connective media.

José van DijckUNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM -MEDIA STUDIES It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes. (Time Magazine,

About the JournalMedia and Communication is an international open access journal dedicated to a wide variety of basic and applied research in communication and its related fields. It aims at providing a research forum on the social and cultural relevance of media and communication processes. Abstract: 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 institutions by calling attention to social media logic-the norms, strategies, mechanisms, and economies-underpinning its dynamics. This logic will be considered in light of what has been identified as mass media logic, which has helped spread the media's powerful discourse outside its institutional boundaries. Theorizing social media logic, we identify four grounding principles-programmability, popularity, connectivity, and datafication-and argue that these principles become increasingly entangled with mass media logic. The logic of social media, rooted in these grounding principles and strategies, is gradually invading all areas of public life. Besides print news and broadcasting, it also affects law and order, social activism, politics, and so forth. Therefore, its sustaining logic and widespread dissemination deserve to be scrutinized in detail in order to better understand its impact in various domains. Concentrating on the tactics and strategies at work in social media logic, we reassess the constellation of power relationships in which social practices unfold, raising questions such as: How does social media logic modify or enhance existing mass media logic? And how is this new media logic exported beyond the boundaries of (social or mass) media proper? The underlying principles, tactics, and strategies may be relatively simple to identify, but it is much harder to map the complex connections between platforms that distribute this logic: users that employ them, technologies that drive them, economic structures that scaffold them, and institutional bodies that incorporate them. www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication Editors-in-Chief

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-presentation, LinkedIn's interface caters towards the need for professional self-promotion. And yet, both platforms deploy similar principles of connectivity and narrative-strategies that can be succinctly revealed in recent interface changes. These changing digital architectures form the necessary backdrop for asking critical questions about online self-presentation: How are public identities shaped through platform interfaces? How do these features enable and constrain the sculpting of personal and professional persona? And what are the consequences of imposed connectivity and narrative uniformity on people's online identities?

About the JournalMedia and Communication is an international open access journal dedicated to a wide variety of basic and applied research in communication and its related fields. It aims at providing a research forum on the social and cultural relevance of media and communication processes. Abstract: 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 institutions by calling attention to social media logic-the norms, strategies, mechanisms, and economies-underpinning its dynamics. This logic will be considered in light of what has been identified as mass media logic, which has helped spread the media's powerful discourse outside its institutional boundaries. Theorizing social media logic, we identify four grounding principles-programmability, popularity, connectivity, and datafication-and argue that these principles become increasingly entangled with mass media logic. The logic of social media, rooted in these grounding principles and strategies, is gradually invading all areas of public life. Besides print news and broadcasting, it also affects law and order, social activism, politics, and so forth. Therefore, its sustaining logic and widespread dissemination deserve to be scrutinized in detail in order to better understand its impact in various domains. Concentrating on the tactics and strategies at work in social media logic, we reassess the constellation of power relationships in which social practices unfold, raising questions such as: How does social media logic modify or enhance existing mass media logic? And how is this new media logic exported beyond the boundaries of (social or mass) media proper? The underlying principles, tactics, and strategies may be relatively simple to identify, but it is much harder to map the complex connections between platforms that distribute this logic: users that employ them, technologies that drive them, economic structures that scaffold them, and institutional bodies that incorporate them. www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication Editors-in-Chief

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 generation of users. This article's aim is to explore how technical changes (digitization) in connection to growing insights in cognitive science and to socio-cultural transformations, have affected personal photography. The increased malleability of photographic images may suit one's need for continuous self-remodeling and instant communication and bonding. However, that same manipulability may also lessen our grip on our images' future repurposing and reframing. Memory will not be eradicated from digital multipurpose tools. Instead, the function of memory reappears in the networked, distributed nature of digital photographs, as most images are sent over the internet and stored in virtual space.

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 cross-sectorization. Next, the metaphor helps to revision the current patchwork of European regulatory frameworks, addressing the power asymmetry between citizens and the data-driven systems through which their daily practices are governed. Finally, the platformization tree serves to identify points of intervention that may inform European regulatory bodies and policy-makers to act as agents of change. Taking a holistic approach to platformization, this visual metaphor may inspire a set of principles that reshapes the platform ecosystem in the interest of society and the common good.