Thomas Poell is Professor of Data, Culture & Institutions at the University of Amsterdam. He is program director MA Media Studies, co-founder of the Research Priority Area on Global Digital Cultures, and faculty lead for the national Human(e) AI & the Datafied Society sector plan. Leveraging social media data and digital methods, Poell has studied how digital platforms are reshaping the mobilization, organization, and communication of protest around the globe. In recent years, he has built a conceptual framework to analyze how platforms and AI are reshaping the cultural industries. Together with Olav Velthuis, he is currently leading an NWO-funded research project on The platformization of the global sex industry.
Poell is co-author of Platforms and Cultural Production with David Nieborg and Brooke Erin Duffy (Polity, 2022) and The Platform Society with José van Dijck and Martijn de Waal (Oxford University Press, 2018). Furthermore, he co-edited The Sage Handbook of Social Media (Sage, 2018), Social Media Materialities and Protest (Routledge, 2018), and Global Cultures of Contestation (Palgrave/McMillan, 2017).
He has published 40+ articles in international peer-reviewed journals, including New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, Social Media + Society, Digital Journalism, Journalism Studies, Internet Policy Review, Chinese Journal of Communication, The Information Society, Social Movement Studies, Communication Theory, Big Data & Society, Television and New Media, and The International Journal of Communication. Finally, he is member of the editorial board of Social Media + Society, Digital Journalism, Platforms & Society, Journal of Digital Social Research, and Communication and the Public.
Editors’ Introduction - Jean Burgess, Alice Marwick and Thomas Poell
1. Pushing back: Social media as an evolutionary phenomenon - John Hartley
2. Early social computing: The rise and fall of the BBS scene (1977–1995) - Aaron Delwiche
3. Alternative histories of social media in Japan and China - Mark McLelland, Haiqing Yu and Gerard Goggin
4. From hypertext to hype and back again: Exploring the roots of social media in early web culture - Michael Stevenson
5. Digital methods for cross-platform analysis - Richard Rogers
6. A computational analysis of social media scholarship - Jeremy Foote, Aaron Shaw and Benjamin Mako Hill
7. Digital discourse: Locating language in new/social media - Crispin Thurlow
8. Ontology - Nick Couldry and Jannis Kallinikos
9. Analysing social media images - Simon Faulkner, Farida Vis and Francesco D’Orazio
10. Ethnography - Jolynna Sinanan and Tom McDonald
11. Web history and social media - Niels Brügger
12. The incomplete political economy of social media - Siva Vaidhyanathan
13. The affordances of social media platforms - Taina Bucher and Anne Helmond
14. Governance of and by platforms - Tarleton Gillespie
15. Social media app economies - Rowan Wilken
16. Labor and social media: The exploitation and emancipation of (almost) everyone online - Jack Linchuan Qiu
17. Silicon Valley and the social media industry - Alice Marwick
18. Alternative social media: From critique to code - Robert W. Gehl
19. Personal connection and relational maintenance in social media use - Kelly Quinn and Zizi Papacharissi
20. Television viewing and fan practice in an era of multiple screens - Rhiannon Bury
21. Trolling, and other problematic social media practices - Gabriele de Seta
22. Memes - Kate Miltner
23. Self-representation in social media - Jill Walker Rettberg
24. Sexual expression in social media - Kath Albury
25. Privacy and surveillance - Daniel Trottier
26. Social media marketing - Michael Serazio and Brooke Erin Duffy
27. Social media and journalism - Alfred Hermida
28. Social media and the cultural and creative industries - Terry Flew
29. Politics 2.0: Social media campaigning - Jessica Baldwin-Philippi
30. Social media and new protest movements - Thomas Poell and José van Dijck
31. Lively data, social fitness and biovalue - Deborah Lupton
32. Social media platforms and education - José van Dijck and Thomas Poell
33. Scholarly communication in social media - Katrin Weller and Isabella Peters