#AoIR2016: Opening Keynote "The Platform Society" by José van Dijck
Channel: Alexander von Humboldt Institut for internet and society
Date: 2016-11-02

As part of the #AoIR2016 conference, we invited José van Dijck to give an opening keynote. Her talk focused on the role of platforms today and how they are infiltrating all pockets of life: From transportation to the hospitality sector, from education and journalism. 

Far from being a smooth and self-evident process, the ‘platform society’ is a confrontation between different value systems, a clash where nothing less than the balance between private and public interests is at stake. It involves a struggle between various social actors. How are platforms and their mechanisms implemented in various sectors? And who is responsible and accountable for anchoring public values and defending the common good in a platform society?

José van Dijck is a professor of Comparative Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research areas include media technologies, digital culture, social media, popularisation of science and medicine, and television and culture. Her latest book, titled The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media, was published by Oxford University Press (2013). She is currently writing a book on the role of online platforms in the public sphere. We are thrilled to have her present the keynote talk at AoIR 2016 in Berlin!

In 2016, the annual conference of the Association of Internet Research took place 5–8 October 2016 at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany and was hosted by the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. AoIR 2016 emphasized the relevance of the Internet in today’s culture and politics. The conference theme addressed the significance of the codes and rules that frame the Internet, as well as their playful circumvention, from technical protocols and popular platforms to the emerging, established, and contested conventions of online communities. Who are the actors both in practices of rule-making and rule-breaking, what are their motivations and resources, and how can their power relations and communicative figurations be described? How does the Internet influence the proliferation of the values that its platforms, services and infrastructures embody, and what spaces of creative resistance persist? How do various forms of technical, social, and cultural hacking subvert these orders?

More Information: http://www.hiig.de/events/aoir-2016-internet-rules/