Seeing the forest for the trees: Visualizing platformization and its governance

Dijck, José van

doi:10.1177/1461444820940293

Cited by 152 publications

(160 citation statements)

References 36 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

129

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…So what does a platform ecosystem look like? Media theorist José van Dijck (2020) has suggested we think of a digital platform as a tree. The various apps and tools that we use each day are the tree’s leaves.…”

Section: Missing the Tree For The Leavesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital platforms aren’t mere tools —they’re complex environments

Garcia¹,

Nichols²

2021

Phi Delta Kappan

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Antero Garcia and T. Philip Nichols explore how classrooms and schools must reframe their conceptions of technology from a focus on tools that serve specific purposes to a focus on platforms and their ecologies. In doing so, they argue, educational stakeholders should attend to three different dimensions of how technology is integrated in schools: the social uses of digital technologies, the design decisions that were made about these products, and the material resources that help make them operate. This approach requires educators to ask complicated questions about what technology does in schools and how to teach with and about it.

show abstract

Section: Missing the Tree For The Leavesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital platforms aren’t mere tools —they’re complex environments

Garcia¹,

Nichols²

2021

Phi Delta Kappan

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Europe is mostly operating under the GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) ecosystem (van Dijck 2020a), where commercial platforms extract data from users through surveillance mechanisms, and monetizes data by using it as a basis for making behavioural predictions (Zuboff 2019). This is linked to the platformization of the eb, he e la fo m h i ing b ine model ba ed on da a eillance ha ned commercial platforms to dominant infrastructures of the internet ecosystem, and penetrated society at large (Helmond 2015;Plantin et al 2016;van Dijck 2020b). In addition to this observation, digital personal, institutional and commercial memory archives are overlapping now (Garde-Hansen 2011) with social media playing a vital role, a he e la fo m g ide eo le beha io h o gh hei no m (Ro 2019) and the imaginary of digital infrastructures (Markham 2020).…”

Section: Co-dependencies Of Memory Ecosystemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Monopolizing Memory to Co-Creating It: Openness and Equity in The Digital Ecosystem

Tzouganatou

Krueckeberg

2021

SPIR

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

With the growing proliferation of digital media into the memory practices of cultural institutions and ordinary people, questions about a growing dependence on monopolistic technology companies on the creation, access and preservation of collective memory have emerged. For cultural institutions that rely on social media to boost their audience engagement, this also means that they lose part of their role as public educators, while ordinary people fear the loss of ownership over their personal memories. This paper proposes equitable approaches to the current digital ecosystem, that is built on the extraction and profit-making of personal data, that can be developed by looking beyond the current market, envisioning possibilities for related policies that could enable the re-design of the current memory ecosystem towards social inclusion. The argument is based on a combination of ethnographic research into initiatives that foster the openness of knowledge by enabling fair practices to be realized in the competitive sphere of the digital economy. Building upon work such as the MyData and the DECODE project, as well as enquiries into personal memory practices of youth living in Germany and the UK.

show abstract

“…While most of the popular business literature puts forward digital platforms' 'blitzscaling' (Hoffman & Yeh, 2018) as a virtue and an ideal new market players should follow, much of social science literature on 'platformization' (Helmond, 2015;Nieborg & Helmond, 2019;van Dijck, 2020) or 'surveillance capitalism' describes the leading platforms' effects in terms of hegemony and dependencies they orchestrate. Both streams largely focus on 'winners' that manage to install themselves as obligatory passage points and, by and large, share the assumption that once dominant, the Facebooks and the Googles become too big to fail, too big to regulate, and too big to die.…”

Section: Kathryn Montalbano Appalachian State University United States Of Americamentioning

confidence: 99%

What Dead-and-Dying Platforms Do for Internet Studies: Situating Technological Failure, Digital Afterlife, and the Web That Was

McCammon

Ruan

Miltner

et al. 2021

SPIR

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This panel explores internet histories through the lens of “platform death” as a way of understanding how digital communities grapple with technological failure, power dynamics, and the divergent notions of the digital afterlife. Collectively, the contributions address the cultural, geopolitical, economic, and socio-legal repercussions of what happens when various platforms fail, decline, or expire. We bring together five presentations that draw on different methods—including document analysis, semi-structured interviews, participant observation—to explore the frailty of platforms, their underlying infrastructures, and their trace data. Together, by examining and theoretically situating the histories of five different platforms (TroopTube, Fanfou, MySpace, YikYak, and Couchsurfing), we consider and complicate how the concept of “platform death” as a metaphor can help reveal the Web’s rhythmic temporality, digital media’s constant reinvention of forms, and the collision of hegemonic and fragile infrastructures in divergent cultural contexts. We ask: What are the theoretical implications of situating platforms as killable, ephemeral, precarious, or transient technologies? What—and who—kills platforms, and in what ways can they have uncertain digital afterlives and even resurrections? What can conceptualizations of dead and dying technologies tell us about the Internet’s growth and stagnation, its present and futures? What is (un)knowable about platforms that once were, and how can this knowledge inform our predictions of future technological failure? We aim to build community, collective imaginings, and future collaborations around a research agenda that centers mnemonic experimentation, comparative platform studies, and archival contestations.

show abstract

Seeing the forest for the trees: Visualizing platformization and its governance

Cited by 152 publications

References 36 publications

Digital platforms aren’t mere tools —they’re complex environments

Digital platforms aren’t mere tools —they’re complex environments

From Monopolizing Memory to Co-Creating It: Openness and Equity in The Digital Ecosystem

What Dead-and-Dying Platforms Do for Internet Studies: Situating Technological Failure, Digital Afterlife, and the Web That Was

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About