Suchergebnisse

The complexities of platforms are increasingly at odds with the narrow legal and economic concepts in which their governance is grounded. This article aims to analyze platformization through the metaphorical lens of a tree to make sense of information ecosystems as hierarchical and interdependent structures. The layered shape of the tree draws attention to the dynamics of power concentration: vertical integration, infrastructuralization, and cross-sectorization. Next, the metaphor helps to revision the current patchwork of European regulatory frameworks, addressing the power asymmetry between citizens and the data-driven systems through which their daily practices are governed. Finally, the platformization tree serves to identify points of intervention that may inform European regulatory bodies and policy-makers to act as agents of change. Taking a holistic approach to platformization, this visual metaphor may inspire a set of principles that reshapes the platform ecosystem in the interest of society and the common good.

Over the past three years, we have witnessed how online digital platforms have deeply penetrated every sector in society, disrupting markets, labor relations and institutions. Five American tech companies (Google-Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft) are now dominating the western world, not just transforming social and civic practices, but affecting the very core of western democratic processes. The digitization of society involves intense struggles between competing ideological systems and contesting societal actors – market, government and civil society – raising an important question: Who is or should be responsible and accountable for anchoring public values in an online world? This article describes and analyzes the European challenge to govern "platform societies" which are increasingly dependent on global commercial infrastructures – ecosystems that are privatized and whose mechanisms are hidden from public view. Translated by Eleonora Benecchi

Summary
Due to the digitization of sources, humanities scholars have to develop new research questions and methodologies. This article theorizes the 'digital turn' by looking at three challenges: the necessity of combining qualitative and quantitative methods; the dilemma of multidisciplinary cooperation; and the ideological question of why and how the humanities should be concerned with a new digital materiality. We need the expertise of humanities scholars – their critical insights, analytical acuity, and knowledge of ambiguity and diversity – to make sense of a digital culture that permeates and directs our daily life.

Digital technologies offer new opportunities in the everyday lives of people: with still expanding memory capacities, the computer is rapidly becoming a giant storage and processing facility for recording and retrieving 'bits of life'. Software engineers and companies promise not only to expand the capacity of personal memory infinitely, but even revolutionize its nature. Both in the past and recent years, the idea of a universal memory machine has been conceptualized in fantasies and actual projects (e.g. Vannevar Bush's 'Memex', 1945). Discussing the intentions of contemporary technical projects (Shoebox, Experience on Demand) as well as visionary projects (Lifestreams, Memories for Life, MyLifeBits), this article critically analyses how digital personal memory machines use the computer as a model for the way in which memory works. Rather than looking at computers as jukeboxes of memory, it proposes to pay attention to the performative nature of machines in the acts of remembering.

Recent attacks on scientific authority have intensified calls for climate scientists to seek out a more active stake in public engagement. Yet, today's media landscape presents scientists with the challenge of gaining the epistemic trust of diverse audiences. This article qualitatively investigates how publicly engaged academic climate researchers imagine the public as they partake in various science communication practices. It finds that scientists' strategies for securing public trust in their epistemic authority and defining their own public role vary with the media public they are addressing. Their communications reflect an oscillation between filling a "knowledge deficit" and communicating complex "truth tensions."

In this interview, José van Dijck distinguishes the concept of deplatformization from deplatforming and platformization. It describes the phenomena of the systematic pushing back of controversial platforms and their communities to the edge of the platform ecosystem, dominated by mainstream platforms (such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft). Deplatformization further demonstrates the hierarchical power relations within the global platform ecosystem and the complexity of platform governability. From the European perspective, van Dijck argues that public values and public institutions should play more active role in platform governance. The recent Russia–Ukraine war also indicates the vulnerability brought by such co- and inter-dependence on American platforms.

Electronic identification services (eIDs) have become strategic services in the global governance of online societies. In this article, we argue that eIDs are sociotechnical constructs that also have political-economic dimensions. In the European context, governmental and corporate efforts to develop eIDs are shaped by legal EU frameworks, which are almost exclusively focussed on technical and legal interoperability, such as the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and the European Interoperability Reference Architecture (EIRA). Public concerns such as privacy, security, user empowerment and control over one's personal information prompts developers to propose a decentralized, attribute-based system governed on a nonprofit, nonstate basis (DAN-eID). To illustrate our argument, we explore a single emerging eID system (IRMA; acronym for I Reveal My Attributes) that is developing in a national context (The Netherlands). We argue that developing eIDs requires more than engineering ingenuity and legal compliance; as sociotechnical and political-economic constructs, they involve negotiation of conflicting social and political values.

This special of Internet Policy Review is the second to bring together the best policy-oriented papers presented at the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). The conference in Montréal, in October 2018, was organised around the theme of "Transnational materialities". As explained in the editorial to this issue, the contributions map the larger debate on internet governance research in terms of perspectives rather than disciplines. The eleven papers in this span a wide range of topics, including normative perspectives on how platforms shape democracy, conceptual perspectives on how to think platform power, and social and legal views on data-driven governance.

The institutions we have come to call "media" have been involved for over a century in providing an infrastructure for social life and have invested in a quite particular and privileged way of re-presenting the world as "social." The dialectic between "media" and "social" has become more urgent to understand in an era when media and information infrastructures have expanded, converged, and become embedded more deeply in the texture of everyday life, while at the same time the claims of "media" to be social have become explicit, indeed insistent. This article asks what it would mean to address this new social/media dialectic head on—as if the social mattered. The word "social" is our necessary term for thinking about the complex interdependencies out of which human life really is made and the claims to represent that interdependent reality made from particular positions of power. All forms of power have invested in certain representations of the social. This battle matters, and now "social media"—the infrastructures of web 2.0—are at the heart of that battle. The article seeks to offer a plausible agenda for a collaborative program of research to address this struggle over the definition of "the social."