Platforms Everywhere: Understanding What Platforms Are and How to Study Them

For years, much of public and academic debates about platforms revolved around social media. Today, attention has shifted toward artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructures, and AI platforms. Yet many of the underlying concerns remain the same: concentration of power, data extraction, infrastructure dependency, governance, and control.

This continuity reflects a broader transformation. Platforms are no longer simply apps or websites. They increasingly function as infrastructures that organise communication, commerce, cultural production, education, logistics, and artificial intelligence itself.

This is the starting point of our new book, Platforms: A Critical Introduction (Polity, 2026). The book offers an accessible introduction to the field of platform studies while developing a framework for understanding how platforms operate, evolve, and exert power across contemporary societies.

We argue that platforms should be understood as socio-technical systems that simultaneously operate as services, companies, and technologies or infrastructures. Across these dimensions, platforms act as powerful convenors and shapers, bringing together users, developers, advertisers, businesses, governments, and institutions while structuring the conditions under which these actors interact.

A second central argument is that platforms should not be studied as isolated entities. They operate as ecosystems that connect multiple actors through shared infrastructures, standards, interfaces, and governance systems. This ecosystem perspective helps explain how platforms become indispensable intermediaries and why their power extends far beyond individual apps or services.

The book also makes a methodological case for studying platforms infrastructurally. Beyond interfaces and user practices, we need to examine APIs, cloud infrastructures, developer ecosystems, governance systems, business models, and technical dependencies. Understanding these often less visible layers is essential for understanding how platforms shape contemporary society.

Platforms are not simply technologies we use. They increasingly organise the conditions under which social, cultural, economic, and political life takes place.

The book is published by Polity and available now. More information can be found here: https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=9781509568109

Polity is currently offering a 30% discount through its website with the code HVD30. Feel free to use the code yourself or share it with others who may be interested.