An open lecture by José van Dijck, a distinguished professor in Media and Digital Societies at Utrecht University, The Netherlands.

The growing pains of digitalization involve intense struggles between two platform ecosystems fighting for information control: a Chinese-based and an American-based ecosystem. A handful of American Big Tech platforms have disrupted markets and labor relations, transforming social and civic practices, and affecting democracies. At the heart of the online media industry’s surge is the battle over information control: who owns the data generated by online social activities? While two large ecosystems fight for information control in the global online world, the European perspective on digital infrastructures is focused on regulation rather than building its own alternatives. With emerging technologies such as generative AI (ChatGPT, Bard), this infrastructural perspective becomes more poignant.

This lecture will take up two questions. First, how can we identify public values in platform societies across the globe? Values such as privacy, security, transparency, equality, public trust, and institutional sovereignty are important principles upon which the design of platform architectures should be based. Democratic principles and the common good are the very stakes in the struggle over the platformization of societies around the globe. Second, what responsibilities do companies, governments and citizens have in building an alternative, sustainable platform ecosystem and negotiating public values on behalf of citizens and consumers?

When: 29 April 2025, 14:00–16:00
Where: UB425, Södertörn University

Biographical Note

José van Dijck is a distinguished university professor in Media and Digital Societies at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. In 2021, she was rewarded the Spinoza Prize, the highest academic award in Dutch academia, and the C. Edwin Baker Award for the Advancement of Scholarship on Media, Markets and Democracy by the International Communication Association (ICA).

Her work covers a wide range of topics in media theory, media and communication technologies, social media, and digital culture. She is the (co-)author and (co-)editor of ten books and over one hundred journal articles and book chapters. Her books The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford UP, 2013) and The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World (Oxford UP, 2018; co-authored by Thomas Poell & Martijn de Waal) have been distributed worldwide and were translated into Spanish, Italian, Chinese and Farsi.

Van Dijck has a PhD from the University of California San Diego (UCSD). She was formerly chair and dean at the University of Amsterdam and served one term as President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences from 2015 until 2018. She received honorary doctorates from Lund University (2019) and the University of Oslo (2024). Her visiting appointments include M.I.T. (USA), the University of Toronto (CAN), Stockholm University (SWE) and the University of Technology, Sydney (AUS).