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Seeing Like a Platform
Petter Törnberg and Justus Uitermark
2025
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Power needs abstraction, to make the unwieldy complexity of the social world legible and manageable. The proposition at the heart of Seeing Like a Platform is that digital technology brings new metaphors through which power operates. While industrial modernity saw society as a machinery to be designed according to detailed blueprints, digital modernity views society as organic and alive, to be herded and nudged through digital infrastructures, AI, and algorithms.
Seeing Like a Platform explores the history, meaning, and far-reaching consequences of this epistemological shift. From social movements to Wikipedia, from digital platforms to city planning, from social science to media, society is being redefined by ideas from complexity science. While complexity offers a vision of a self-organized society freed from hierarchies and overbearing bureaucracies, it simultaneously enables new forms of domination and control.
Through theoretical reflections and case studies, Seeing Like a Platform offers an inquiry into digital modernity. Accessibly written and broad ranging, it is an essential reading for scholars, students, and practitioners in fields such as sociology, political science, urban studies, and technology studies. It will also interest anyone keen to understand the profound impact of digital technologies on governance, social organization, and everyday life.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
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Keywords
- Algorithms
- big data
- complex systems
- complexity
- Computational social science
- Digital Technology
- Power
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JH Sociology and anthropology::JHB Sociology::JHBA Social theory
- thema EDItEUR::U Computing and Information Technology::UB Information technology: general topics::UBJ Digital and information technologies: social and ethical aspects
- thema EDItEUR::U Computing and Information Technology::UB Information technology: general topics::UBL Digital and information technologies: Legal aspects
- thema EDItEUR::U Computing and Information Technology::UM Computer programming / software engineering::UMB Algorithms and data structures
- thema EDItEUR::U Computing and Information Technology::UR Computer security::URD Privacy and data protection
- thema EDItEUR::U Computing and Information Technology::UY Computer science
Links
DOI: 10.4324/9781003326861Editions