Platform Ideologies: Ideological Production in Digital Intermediation Platforms and Structural Effectivity in the “Sharing Economy”

Abstract

Drawing from three sets of literature (critical economy of platformization, labor organization, and digital activism), this article introduces an integrated framework to analyze ideological production in digital intermediation platforms, particularly in relation to the sharing economy. We analyze documents, fieldwork interviews from twenty-eight actors, and observation of events in Barcelona, Paris, and Berlin during 2015–2017. We find that there are three dominant ideological strands: “sharing economy,” “commons,” and “platform cooperativism,” within a spectrum that ranges from legitimizing neoliberalism and/or reasserting a reformist, more humane capitalism to more radical visions: cooperative society to commons-oriented production, and resisting privatization, through the recapturing of public space as commons. The actors we interviewed can be seen as part of an intermediate class, dependent on platforms for their survival, and who end up involuntary promoters of their own alienation and exploitation, consolidating the deterioration of the very digital labor conditions they seek to transform.

From Disembedding to Digital Re-Embedding: Social Media Empowerment and Solidarity Practices of Chinese Truck Drivers

“…In recent years, digital intermediation platforms have emerged in diverse fields around the world, giving rise to new types of digital gig workers (Karatzogianni & Matthews, 2020). As “a set of online digital arrangements whose algorithms serve to organize and structure economic and social activity” (Kenney & Zysman, 2016, p. 65), digital intermediation platforms offer “workers considerable autonomy over when and how often to work” (Vallas & Schor, 2020, p. 283).…”

Theorizing platformization from the perspective of the connection between mobile journalism and political participation

“…We suppose that platform functionality and platform automation exert institutional influence on journalism, culture, business, politics, and other domains. (Nieborg & Poell, 2018;Helmond, 2015;Karatzogianni & Matthews, 2020;Nieborg & Helmond, 2019). To explain the influence, some scholars coin the notion of platformization.…”

Commercialization of Creative Videos in China in the Digital Platform Age

“…As the "political rebranding" of what were previously cultural industries (Gill and Pratt 2008, 2), creative production, especially digital creative video production, has also undergone a transformation of platformization. Due to this platformization process, the term "platform" has become a discursive resting point to frame diverse platforms of cultural production, from game design (Montfort and Bogost 2009) to content-sharing websites (Helmond 2015) and social media applications (van Dijck 2013), indicating the cultural cooperative production and commons-oriented production in different digital platforms (Karatzogianni and Matthews 2020). With the proliferation of online video platforms such as YouTube, Veoh, Revver, MTV's Flux, and Kaltura (Gillespie 2010, 351), scholars have studied the governing issues (Just 2018), competitive dynamics (Kim et al 2016), and value creation (Xie et al 2019) of different video platforms.…”