Category: platforms

Book Review: Cloud Empires: How Digital Platforms Are Overtaking the State and How We Can Regain Control by Vili Lehdonvirta

In Cloud Empires: How Digital Platforms Are Overtaking the State and How We Can Regain Control, Vili Lehdonvirta argues that the internet has become ruled by Silicon Valley despots who govern new marketplaces and need to be held more accountable, write…

Book Review: Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim our Digital Future from Big Tech by James Muldoon

In Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim our Digital Future from Big Tech, James Muldoon explores how to bring about a reorganisation of the digital economy through the social ownership of digital assets and democratic control over digital infrastructure …

Book Review: The Public and their Platforms: Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media by Mark Carrigan and Lambros Fatsis

In The Public and their Platforms: Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media, Mark Carrigan and Lambros Fatsis explore the discipline of sociology at a time when public life is increasingly shaped by social media platforms. Published in the context of…

How to Conduct Valid Social Science Research Using MTurk – A checklist

The use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) for social science research has increased exponentially in recent years. Although there is great excitement about the practical and logistical benefits, there is justifiable skepticism about the validity of research using data collected with MTurk. In this post, Herman Aguinis, Isabel Villamor, and Ravi S. Ramani provide 10 … Continued

Book Review: Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures by Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin

In Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures, Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin elaborate on how and why Instagram has grown to become an icon that has altered understandings of visual social media cultures. Students, scholars, social media practitioners and platform users can all benefit from the book as a great introduction to how to approach and study … Continued

Book Review: The Quirks of Digital Culture by David Beer

In The Quirks of Digital Culture, David Beer provides a patchwork of quirky vignettes that together create a representative picture of the cultural environment in which we now live, showing how digital culture offers a means of access, insight and possibility while also bringing the payoff of surveillance, manipulation and a sense of inescapability. Ignas Kalpokas highly … Continued

Our Profile(d) Selves: How social media platforms use data to tell us who we should be

Social media platforms have become an everyday feature of modern life. One feature common to these platforms is the creation of a user profile. These profiles are vital for social media companies to make money from data analytics and targeted advertising. In this post, Lukasz Szulc explores how social media platforms translate this data-driven business model into the design and […]