Against the backdrop of ongoing public and political debates about the power and regulation of large platform conglomerates, this special issue calls for more critical, conceptual, and empirical studies on platform power. While a lot of valuable research has already been done, we see a tendency...

This chapter discusses how the intensive use of social media transforms the organization and communication of protest. The starting point of this discussion is to question the idea that traditional modes of organization in social movements (with structural features like identifiable leaders and...

Since 2012, platforms for massive open online courses (MOOCs), such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX, have had a considerable impact on established forms of higher education, both online and off-line, private and public. What are the technocommercial and sociocultural dynamics underlying the...

Over the past decade, social media platforms have penetrated deeply into the mechanics of everyday life, affecting people's informal interactions, as well as institutional structures and professional routines. Far from being neutral platforms for everyone, social media have changed the...

The purpose of this paper is to better understand how open and shared data impacts the economy. Focusing on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups, we consider 354 case studies of companies currently using open data, so that we can better understand how open data can be used and...

The United Kingdom has been a leader in the open data movement – a new movement by governments around the world to open up the vast repositories of data they hold across agencies and departments, and to collect new kinds of data for public use. Open data is publicly available data that can be...

Multi-sided platforms such as Apple's App Store and Valve's Steam become increasingly dominant when more end users and complement producers join their ecosystems. Despite their importance to a platform's overall success, however, we know little about complement producers and how they are...

This review examines the alleged crisis of trust in environmental science and its impact on public opinion, policy decisions in the context of democratic governance, and the interaction between science and society. In an interdisciplinary manner, the review focuses on the following themes: the...