The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready

By Anne Helmond. 2015

970 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this article, I inquire into Facebook’s development as a platform by situating it within the transformation of social network sites into social media platforms. I explore this shift with a historical perspective on, what I refer to as, platformization, or the rise of the platform as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the social web and its consequences. Platformization entails the extension of social media platforms into the rest of the web and their drive to make external web data “platform ready.” The specific technological architecture and ontological distinctiveness of platforms will be examined by taking their programmability into account. I position platformization as a form of platform critique that inquires into the dynamics of the decentralization of platform features and the recentralization of “platform ready” data as a way to examine the consequences of the programmability of social media platforms for the web.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fa7a7b8ed5d2aa4addbb5967caf51ac704245437

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Citations in the corpus

Platformisation (2019, background): “A broader field of software studies research has been developed in parallel by scholars who foregrounded platforms as (re-)programmable software systems that revolve around the systematic collection and processing of user data (Helmond, 2015; Langlois & Elmer, 2013; Plantin et al., 2018).”
Intimate Surveillance: Normalizing Parental Monitoring and Mediation of Infants Online (2017, background): “…apps not just to record significant amounts of data but also to share this on social networks and elsewhere positions these tools as part of the “platformization of the web” (Helmond, 2015) wherein data flows are being shaped for the benefit of existing platforms as much as for individual users.”
Expanding the debate about content moderation: Scholarly research agendas for the coming policy debates (2020, neutral): “…so doing, they have enmeshed themselves with the wider web and with deeper layers of existing non-digital infrastructures, acquiring a scale and indispensability that requires us to shift the kinds of questions we ask about them (Helmond, 2015; Plantin et al., 2018; Plantin & Punathambekar, 2018).”
Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook (2018, background): “These same properties also make Facebook a formidable force in a profit-motivated “platformization” (Helmond, 2015), which is beginning to eat away at the foundational promise of the Open Web.”
The co-evolution of two Chinese mobile short video apps: Parallel platformization of Douyin and TikTok (2020, methodology): “The term platformization was first introduced by Helmond (2015) to conceptualize the rise of digital platforms as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the social web and its consequences.”
The platformization of cultural production: Theorizing the contingent cultural commodity (2018, positive): “Collectively, these overlapping approaches emphasize the material, computational, and infrastructural dimension of platforms (Helmond, 2015; Montfort and Bogost, 2009; Plantin et al., 2018).”
WeChat as infrastructure: the techno-nationalist shaping of Chinese digital platforms (2019, methodology): “In both Official Accounts and Mini Programs, the decentralization of software architecture combined with the re-centralization of its data flows are necessary processes in the platformization of social media (Gerlitz & Helmond, 2013; Helmond, 2015).”