Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3507774.pdf

The New York Review of Books

Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society

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.

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Understanding Social Media Logic

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 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, 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 sectors: 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.

The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World

This article explores how the political economy of the cultural industries changes through platformization: the penetration of economic and infrastructural extensions of online platforms into the w...

/pdf/the-platformization-of-cultural-production-theorizing-the-3h63sys025.pdf

The platformization of cultural production: Theorizing the contingent cultural commodity:

This article examines the appropriation of social media as platforms of alternative journalism by the protestors of the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto, Canada. The Toronto Community Mobilization Network, the network that coordinated the protests, urged participants to broadcast news using Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. This particular use of social media is studied in the light of the history and theory of alternative journalism. Analyzing a set of 11,556 tweets, 222 videos, and 3,338 photos, the article assesses user participation in social media protest reporting, as well as the resulting protest accounts. The findings suggest that social media did not facilitate the crowd-sourcing of alternative reporting, except to some extent for Twitter. As with many previous alternative journalistic efforts, reporting was dominated by a relatively small number of users. In turn, the resulting account itself had a strong event-oriented focus, mirroring often-criticized mainstream protest reporting practices.

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Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr as platforms of alternative journalism: the social media account of the 2010 Toronto G20 protests

This article investigates the claims and complexities involved in the platform-based economics of health and fitness apps. We examine a double-edged logic inscribed in these platforms, promising to offer personal solutions to medical problems while also contributing to the public good. On the one hand, online platforms serve as personalized data-driven services to their customers. On the other hand, they allegedly serve public interests, such as medical research or health education. In doing so, many apps employ a diffuse discourse, hinging on terms like ‘‘sharing,’’ ‘‘open,’’ and ‘‘reuse’’ when they talk about data extraction and distribution. The analytical approach we adopt in this article is situated at the nexus of science and technology studies, political economy, and the sociology of health and illness. The analysis concentrates on two aspects: datafication (the use and reuse of data) and commodification (a platform’s deployment of governance and business models). We apply these analytical categories to three specific platforms: 23andMe, PatientsLikeMe, and Parkinson mPower. The last section will connect these individual examples to the wider implications of health apps’ data flows, governance policies, and business models. Regulatory bodies commonly focus on the (medical) safety and security of apps, but pay scarce attention to health apps’ techno-economic governance. Who owns user-generated health data and who gets to benefit? We argue that it is important to reflect on the societal implications of health data markets. Governments have the duty to provide conceptual clarity in the grand narrative of transforming health care and health research.

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Thomas Poell

Papers

Understanding Social Media Logic

The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World

The platformization of cultural production: Theorizing the contingent cultural commodity:

Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr as platforms of alternative journalism: the social media account of the 2010 Toronto G20 protests

Understanding the promises and premises of online health platforms