The widespread uptake of digital platforms – from YouTube and Instagram to TikTok and ChatGPT– is reconfiguring cultural production in profound, complex, and highly uneven ways around the globe. Longstanding media industries are experiencing tremendous upheaval, while new industrial formations – live-streaming, social media creation, and podcasting, among others – are evolving at a breakneck pace. In this talk, Thomas Poell will discuss his Global Perspectives on Platforms and Cultural Production project. The starting point is his book Platforms and Cultural Production (Polity, 2022), co-authored with David Nieborg and Brooke Erin Duffy, which examines both the processes and implications of platformization across the cultural industries.
It identifies key changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance at play in this ongoing transformation, as well as pivotal shifts in the practices of labor, creativity, and democracy. In the second half of the talk, Poell turns to his current research which aims to multiply our frames of reference in the examination of platforms and the cultural industries, provincializing the Anglo-American world and Northwestern Europe in this field of study. Pursuing this objective, together with colleagues, he brings together ideas from postcolonial and decolonial theory and platform studies in a systematic research program. This global perspectives program allows us to: denaturalize and rethink dominant concepts and ideas through research from around the globe; explicitly thematize and examine the global power relations that structure platform economies; and critically interrogate the knowledge production about these economies.
Bio
Thomas Poell is Professor of Data, Culture & Institutions at the University of Amsterdam. He is program director MA Media Studies, co-founder of the Research Priority Area on Global Digital Cultures, and faculty lead for the national Human(e) AI & the Datafied Society sector plan. Leveraging social media data and digital methods, Poell has studied how the use of digital platforms is affecting the mobilization, organization, and communication of protest around the globe. In recent years, he has built a conceptual framework to analyze how platforms and AI are reshaping the cultural industries. Together with Olav Velthuis, he is leading an NWO-funded project on The platformization of the global sex industry.
And with Zhen Ye, Smith Metha, Lorena Caminhas, Arturo Arriagada, Godwin Simon, and David Nieborg, he is developing a research project on AI and Creative Work, which connects platform studies with ideas from postcolonial and decolonial theory in a Global Perspectives program. Finally, with David Nieborg and José van Dijck, he is currently writing a book on Platform Power.