Platforms as the dominant information infrastructure.
11 topics · 16 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Beware online filter bubbles
Eli Pariser (TED) · 2011
Argues that personalised ranking quietly edits what each person can see and removes the shared material democracies argue over; later empirical work…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
What Makes Online Content Viral?
Berger & Milkman · 2012
Finds content evoking high-arousal emotions, positive or negative, is shared more than content evoking low-arousal ones, arguing physiological…
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Network Externalities, Competition, and Compatibility
Katz & Shapiro · 1985
Formalises why a product's value to a user rises with the number of other users, and shows this fact alone can tip a market to one incompatible…
+6 more at this level
12 of 16 works
Eli Pariser (TED)
Argues that personalised ranking quietly edits what each person can see and removes the shared material democracies argue over; later empirical work has found the effect weaker and more self-selected than claimed here.
link checked 17 Sept 2026danah boyd
Argues teenagers use social media to recreate the public and private life that adult-controlled schedules and spaces have taken from them, and that most adult fears about the platforms mistake the symptom for the cause.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Tarleton Gillespie
Argues platforms have always been in the business of moderating content despite marketing themselves as neutral conduits, and that this hidden curatorial work is what actually defines what a social medium is.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Berger & Milkman
Finds content evoking high-arousal emotions, positive or negative, is shared more than content evoking low-arousal ones, arguing physiological arousal rather than valence alone drives virality.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ferrara et al.
Surveys how automated accounts manipulate public discourse at scale and argues that as bots grow harder to tell from humans, the arms race between detection and evasion will not be won outright by either side.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Duffy & Wissinger
Argues platforms sell aspiring creators a mythology of glamorous, self-expressive work that obscures the unpaid labour and constant self-branding actually required to succeed, especially for women.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Mathur et al.
Finds manipulative interface designs that push users toward choices they would not otherwise make on over a tenth of surveyed shopping sites, clustered around a small number of well-known third-party design tools.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Caplan & Gillespie
Argues YouTube's opaque, tiered demonetization system turned creators from independent producers into a precarious workforce managed by rules the platform can change unilaterally and without explanation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Evelyn Douek
Argues content moderation should be judged as a whole system of interacting rules, appeals and enforcement rather than case by case, because a platform's individual decisions can each look defensible while the system they add up to fails.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Katz & Shapiro
Formalises why a product's value to a user rises with the number of other users, and shows this fact alone can tip a market to one incompatible standard even when a competing one is technically better.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Bakshy, Messing & Adamic
Finds Facebook's algorithm modestly reduces exposure to cross-cutting political content, but users' own choices about who to friend and what to click filter out far more of it than the algorithm does.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Covington, Adams & Sargin
Describes the two-stage candidate-generation-then-ranking architecture behind YouTube's recommendations and argues that optimising for predicted watch time, not clicks, is what drives engagement at that scale.
link checked 17 Sept 2026