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The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World
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. The promise of connective platforms is that they offer personalized services and contribute to innovation and economic growth, while bypassing cumbersome institutional or industrial overhead.
In The Platform Societ y, 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, circumventing institutions, transforming social and civic practices and affecting democratic processes. This book questions what role online platforms play in the organization of Western societies. First, how do platform mechanisms work and to what effect are they deployed? Second, how can platforms incorporate public values and benefit the public good?
The Platform Society analyzes intense struggles between competing ideological systems and contesting societal actors -- market, government and civil society -- raising the issue of 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 this struggle plays out in four private and public news, urban transport, health, and education. Each struggle highlights local dimensions, for instance fights over regulation between individual platforms and city governments, but also addresses the level of the platform ecosystem as well as the geopolitical level where power clashes between global markets and (supra-)national governments take place.
In The Platform Societ y, 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, circumventing institutions, transforming social and civic practices and affecting democratic processes. This book questions what role online platforms play in the organization of Western societies. First, how do platform mechanisms work and to what effect are they deployed? Second, how can platforms incorporate public values and benefit the public good?
The Platform Society analyzes intense struggles between competing ideological systems and contesting societal actors -- market, government and civil society -- raising the issue of 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 this struggle plays out in four private and public news, urban transport, health, and education. Each struggle highlights local dimensions, for instance fights over regulation between individual platforms and city governments, but also addresses the level of the platform ecosystem as well as the geopolitical level where power clashes between global markets and (supra-)national governments take place.
240 pages, Paperback
Published November 2, 2018
26 people are currently reading
232 people want to read
About the author
José van Dijck
20 books21 followersJosé van Dijck is a professor of Comparative Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam.
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July 31, 2020This book is impressive,if a bit repetitive. its core argument is that we have to shift our perception of platforms, or popular digital architectures, as an isolated phenomenon of the tech era. Rather, platforms are now defining the society we inhabit in total. They have superseded our old social structures and transformed our public values, our social contract, our expectations of the roles of institutions like universities, the media,and government, and our ways of calculating the value of users, data exhaust, and attentiveness. Platforms have reshaped our economic ecosystem towards the centrality of the 'Big Five' and the orbit of satellite companies and partnerships, such as API's and data analytics firms.
Particularly interesting or distressing is the book's insight that platform companies operate with a libertarian ideology of avoiding taxes and branding themselves as mere connectors instead of institutions, when in fact their operations are dependent on our collective public infrastructures (roads, content generation) that they are reluctant to acknowledge and contribute towards. Furthermore, the libertarian ethos is evident in the commission of workers as microentrepreneurs or gig workers, corroding social norms about salaries, social security, and safety nets, and shifting the cost of these employment standards from the employer to the public at large. Another particularly maddening example is the univocally decided partnership between the NHS and Google Deepmind, where the NHS provides all patient data- the lifeblood of Google's extensive power and valuation- for free, while Google provides NHS with some services-- for a fee. What has it come to that we are essentially subsidizing private monopolies and giving them all our private data too, then thanking them for it with a second round of money...
Particularly interesting or distressing is the book's insight that platform companies operate with a libertarian ideology of avoiding taxes and branding themselves as mere connectors instead of institutions, when in fact their operations are dependent on our collective public infrastructures (roads, content generation) that they are reluctant to acknowledge and contribute towards. Furthermore, the libertarian ethos is evident in the commission of workers as microentrepreneurs or gig workers, corroding social norms about salaries, social security, and safety nets, and shifting the cost of these employment standards from the employer to the public at large. Another particularly maddening example is the univocally decided partnership between the NHS and Google Deepmind, where the NHS provides all patient data- the lifeblood of Google's extensive power and valuation- for free, while Google provides NHS with some services-- for a fee. What has it come to that we are essentially subsidizing private monopolies and giving them all our private data too, then thanking them for it with a second round of money...
August 30, 2020
Dentro da economia digital, há um interesse crescente sobre as plataformas digitais. Sabe? Plataformas como o iFood, o Blablacar e... mesmo o Instagram! Algumas plataformas crescem ao ponto de se tornarem infraestruturas da sociedade contemporânea, intermediando notícias, serviços de transporte urbano, entre outros setores. Nem sempre este papel é conduzido socialmente da melhor maneira pela iniciativa privada que lidera o ecossistema de plataformas.
O livro dos holandeses demonstra como a arquitetura das plataformas, em termos de arranjo proprietário, transparência e governança carrega uma ideologia – libertária no ecossistema dos EUA e autoritária/estatizante no ecossistema chinês; os mecanismos que as plataformas utilizam em seu modus operandi: dataficação, comoditização e seleção; como as plataformas do ecossistema norte-americano vem erodindo valores públicos, instituições públicas tradicionais e mecanismos de seleção e validação do conhecimento tradicionais mundo afora; finalmente, como este último ponto não é imutável: plataformas mudam suas práticas, seus termos de serviço, suas políticas de transparência, prestação de contas e mesmo seu status proprietário ao longo de sua história – e a participação de todos os atores sociais – mercado, governo e sociedade civil – pode articular plataformas alinhadas com valores públicos tais como transparência, privacidade de dados, sistemas de dados públicos (que são diferentes de dados abertos), segurança e qualidade dos serviços oferecidos.
O livro dos holandeses demonstra como a arquitetura das plataformas, em termos de arranjo proprietário, transparência e governança carrega uma ideologia – libertária no ecossistema dos EUA e autoritária/estatizante no ecossistema chinês; os mecanismos que as plataformas utilizam em seu modus operandi: dataficação, comoditização e seleção; como as plataformas do ecossistema norte-americano vem erodindo valores públicos, instituições públicas tradicionais e mecanismos de seleção e validação do conhecimento tradicionais mundo afora; finalmente, como este último ponto não é imutável: plataformas mudam suas práticas, seus termos de serviço, suas políticas de transparência, prestação de contas e mesmo seu status proprietário ao longo de sua história – e a participação de todos os atores sociais – mercado, governo e sociedade civil – pode articular plataformas alinhadas com valores públicos tais como transparência, privacidade de dados, sistemas de dados públicos (que são diferentes de dados abertos), segurança e qualidade dos serviços oferecidos.
January 28, 2024
Livro didático e que todo pesquisador sobre a sociedade de plataformas deveria ler. No entanto, chega a ser bem repetitivo. Além disso, como em praticamente todo livro sobre o tema, a autora também chega a ser bastante ingênua na proposição de soluções para como devemos lidar com o poder cada vez mais tentacularizado das plataformas.
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March 23, 2022professors stop assigning me entire books to read for class challenge 🤕
February 24, 2025
Read in connection with studies in Library and Information Science (LIS) at Linnaeus University.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews