Platform Futures: Contesting Technology and Governance Trajectories

This talk compares arguments for interventions in the digital platform market that envisage that a better ‘balancing’ of public and commercial values can be achieved with arguments for a deeper contestation with the underlying logics of data driven markets which might result in shifting the digital innovation trajectory. It suggests the need for a radical reframing of initiatives to govern digital technology innovation drawing on contemporary initiatives aimed at reducing the harms associated with commercial datafication.

Robin Mansell is Professor of New Media and the Internet in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research and teaching focus on media and communications regulation and policy, internet governance, privacy and surveillance, digital platforms, socio-technical features of data and information systems, and the social, political and economic impacts of innovation in digital networks and applications. Her current research addresses the political economy of ‘platformisation’ and ‘datafication’ and its consequences for society in diverse contexts around the world. She is author of ‘Imagining the Internet: Communication, Innovation and Governance’ (Oxford UP 2012) and co-author of 'Advanced Introduction to Platform Economics' (Edward Elgar, 2020).

The event is part of the Seminar Series “Platform Politics and Policy”.

Researchers from outside the WZB who would like to attend may email the organizer, robert.gorwa [at] wzb.eu, to be put onto the seminar series mailing list.