Book review: The Platform Society

The Platform Society sets out to understand the role that many of the new digital platforms of our time have come to play in public life and societal organization, and how they have altered (or attempted to alter) social practices and institutions within the countries in which they operate. In the book’s introductory paragraph, the authors – Jose van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal – point to terms like “the sharing economy”, “the platform revolution”, and “the gig economy” as attempts to describe the social change that have taken place over the past three decades alongside the transformation of the internet. It is an explicit ambition of the book to examine what role online platforms play in the organization of public values in both American and western European societies, as well as the issue of how public values can be forced upon the ecosystem that these platforms make up between them.