Seeing Like a Platform : An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity

Törnberg, Petter; Uitermark, Justus

ISBN 10: 103235433X / ISBN 13: 9781032354330

Published by Routledge, 2025

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Seeing Like a Platform : An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity
• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 103235433X
• ISBN 13: 9781032354330
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: As New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Petter Törnberg is Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam. He studies the intersection of AI, social media, and politics using computational methods and digital data for critical inquiry. His most recent book is Intimate Communities of Hate: Why Social Media Fuels Far-Right Extremism (with Anton Törnberg).

Justus Uitermark is a geographer and sociologist at the University of Amsterdam. He holds a chair in Urban Geography and directs the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. Uitermark has written widely on cities, social movements, and digital platforms. His books include On Display: Instagram, the Self, and the City (with John Boy), Cities and Social Movements (with Walter Nicholls), and Dynamics of Power in Dutch Integration Politics.