Associate Professor of Media, Data Society
For the Utrecht University website I did a nice long interview about our book on Platforms: A Critical Introduction (Polity, 2026) co-authored with Fernando van der Vlist. Platforms are everywhere. From Instagram, Spotify and Netflix to Google, Deliveroo and ChatGPT. Many of us use them every single day. Platform researcher Anne Helmond (Utrecht University) explains how Read more What are…
Very happy to have contributed a short piece on the feed for Imagining the Internet(s): A Collaborative Glossary, bringing me back to my early dissertation times when I started studying feeds, APIs, and other syndication protocols. The glossary brings together 28 entries to think about the internet as an imagined object: affordances and infrastructural ideologies, Read more Entry on The Feed for…
Platforms Everywhere: Understanding What Platforms Are and How to Study Them For years, much of public and academic debates about platforms revolved around social media. Today, attention has shifted toward artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructures, and AI platforms. Yet many of the underlying concerns remain the same: concentration of power, data extraction, infrastructure dependency,…
In this discussion we examine the notion of the datafied web by situating it historically and methodologically. By mobilizing insights from a range of fields, the discussion broadens the conceptual and methodological approaches and tools available for studying the datafied web. A dialogue between Migle Bareikyte, Carolin Gerlitz, Sebastian Giessmann, Jonathan W. Y. Gray, Anne Read more The…
Over ten years ago I coined the term platformization (2015) to understand how platforms expand beyond their own boundaries in Social Media + Society. Editor Zizi Papacharissi invited me, along others, to celebrate the journal s 10 years anniversary by reflecting on a decade of platformization. The Platformization of Everything: From the End of the Like Read more The Platformization of Everything:…