For the Utrecht University website I did a nice long interview about our book on Platforms: A Critical Introduction (Polity, 2026) co-authored with Fernando van der Vlist.
Platforms are everywhere. From Instagram, Spotify and Netflix to Google, Deliveroo and ChatGPT. Many of us use them every single day. Platform researcher Anne Helmond (Utrecht University) explains how they work and why they influence your life more than you might think. How did platforms become so powerful? What does that mean for us? And what can we do to become less dependent on them?
Read full article here: https://www.uu.nl/en/background/what-are-platforms-definition-examples-and-why-they-are-so-powerful