The Power of Platforms

Shaping Media and Society

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen author Sarah Anne Ganter author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

Published:13th May '22

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

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The Power of Platforms cover

More people today get news via Facebook and Google than from any news organization in history, and smaller platforms like Twitter serve news to more users than all but the biggest media companies. In The Power of Platforms, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Sarah Anne Ganter draw on original interviews and other qualitative evidence to analyze the "platform power" that a few technology companies have come to exercise in public life, the reservations publishers have about platforms, as well as the reasons why publishers often embrace them nonetheless. Nielsen and Ganter trace how relations between publishers and platforms have evolved across the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. They identify the new, distinct relational and generative forms of power that platforms exercise as people increasingly rely on them to find and access news. Most of the news content we rely on is still produced by journalists working for news organizations, but Nielsen and Ganter chronicle rapid change in the ways in which we discover news, how it is distributed, where decisions are made on what to display (and what not), and in who profits from these flows of information. By examining the different ways publishers have responded to these changes and how various platform companies have in turn handled the increasingly important and controversial role they play in society, The Power of Platforms draws out the implications of a fundamental feature of the contemporary world that we all need to understand: previously powerful and relatively independent institutions like the news media are increasingly in a position similar to that of ordinary individual users, simultaneously empowered by and dependent upon a small number of centrally placed and powerful platforms.

The book uncovers provides a needed starting point from which conditions of non-Western media environments can be investigated, compared, and evaluated. * B. G. Chang, CHOICE *
Whatever your view of whether governments and societies should break up digital platforms, you'll agree that platform power is real. Nielsen and Ganter's book provides the most clear-sighted account yet of how platform power is reconfiguring news publishing. They offer a historically detailed, conceptually precise, and institutionally sensitive account of the deeply asymmetrical relations in which both platforms and publishers are today locked. Essential reading for those who still care about information's role in politics. * Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science *
Even for those of us who study media and tech for a living, it's increasingly difficult to comprehend the last ten years of seismic disruption to the way the public discovers, consumes, and shares information. The Power of Platforms is an important book that brings welcome coherence and insight into the symbiotic and increasingly asymmetrical relationship between news publisher and platforms, how it has upended the media environment, and is transforming societies. * Vivian Schiller, The Aspen Institute *
The power of corporate platforms on the distribution and consumption of news is unprecedented. Nielsen and Ganter's book is an exceptional, thought-provoking analysis of the intricate relationships between platform mechanisms and news publishing. This is truly a must-read for any student of media who wants to understand the controlling role of digital intermediaries. No academic of journalism and media studies can afford to miss out on this valuable treatise of how the business of news production has transformed in recent years and what is at stake for the public sphere. * José van Dijck, Utrecht University, and author of The Culture of Connectivity and The Platform Society *
I would say that the work under study has a very heterogeneous background, with potential interest for public decision-makers in the context of public regulation policies, but also for publishers and journalists in managing their relationship with these conglomerates. * Joao Carlos Sousa, Metascience *

ISBN: 9780190908850

Dimensions: 159mm x 241mm x 20mm

Weight: 517g

272 pages