Dr Jean-Christophe Plantin

This course is available on the MPhil/PhD in Data, Networks and Society, MSc in Media and Communications, MSc in Media and Communications (Data and Society), MSc in Media and Communications (Media and Communications Governance), MSc in Media and Communications (Research) and MSc in Strategic Communications and Society. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course is 'controlled access', meaning that there is a limit to the number of students who can be accepted. If the course is oversubscribed, offers will be made via a random ballot process, with priority given to students with the course listed on their Programme Regulations. Whilst we do our best to accommodate all requests, we cannot guarantee you a place on this course.

There are no pre-requisites for this course. Students should apply via LSE for You without submitting a statement.

Please do not email the teacher with personal expressions of interest as these are not required and do not influence who is offered a place.

While US-based Tech giants (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) are still studied as digital platforms, they now constitute major operators of the internet networking infrastructure, as witnessed by their involvement since early 2010s in four sectors: data centers, undersea cables, telecommunications networks, and cell tower. This course will study this radical extension of platform power over the internet architecture, uses, and governance. It will demonstrate that tech giants become dominant actors in these four infrastructural sectors by using the platform strategy that granted them their initial success, and by adapting it from the web economy to infrastructure management.

The course presents key readings in media & communications and sciences & technology studies to analyse contemporary instances of digital media platforms. Students will explore the multiple facets of the increasing power of internet companies by critically analysing how they replace, conflict with, or influence existing infrastructures, and what are the social, political and epistemological consequences of these tensions. This focus on the relations between existing and emerging media configurations will invite students to investigate how platforms constitute ubiquitous media in everyday life, and how they increasingly shape communication, knowledge production, circulation of data, online participation and mobility.

The first part of the course will introduce the theoretical framework, blending together platform studies (coming from media & communication studies, political economy, management) with infrastructure studies (coming from history, information science, sciences & technology studies). The second part illustrate these interactions through four case studies that sees tech giants taking over the existing infrastructure for global connectivity: data centers, undersea cables, telecommunications networks, and cell tower. The third part addresses current social debates around the platformization of the internet infrastructure, e.g. in terms of global access to internet, tension between states and sovereignty, and governance and regulation.

At the end of the course, students will be able to critically assess the increasing the power that tech giants have over the global infrastructure for connectivity, and to discuss the challenges this process brings in terms of access to communication, knowledge and democratic life.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the AT.

This course includes a reading week in Week 6 of term.

All students are expected to submit either a 1500 word formative essay on current theoretical debates around platforms, infrastructure, and society; or a 1500 word formative proposal for a case study analysis of a digital platform.

• Dijck, José van, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal. 2018. The Platform Society. New York: OUP USA.
• Gillespie, Tarleton. 2018. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. Yale University Press.
• Helmond, Anne. 2015. “The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready.” Social Media + Society 1 (2).
• Parks, Lisa, and Nicole Starosielski. 2015. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. University of Illinois Press.
• Plantin Jean-Christophe, Lagoze, Carl, Edwards, Paul, and Christian Sandvig. 2018. “Infrastructure Studies meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook.” New Media & Society 20 (1): 293–310.
• Star, Susan Leigh, and Karen Ruhleder. “Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces.” Information Systems Research 7 (1996): 111–134.
• Steinberg, Marc. 2019. The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Consumer Internet. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press.

Essay (100%, 3000 words) in the WT.