Skip to content

Week 2: Technology, Platform, Celebrity, and Participation

Mandatory Reading

  • Jenkins, H. (2009, February 13). If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead (part two): Sticky and spreadable – Two paradigms. Henry Jenkins Blog. TikTok_Syllabus
  • Couldry, N., & van Dijck, J. (2015). Researching Social Media as if the Social Mattered. Social Media + Society, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115604174
  • van Dijck, J. (2018). The Platform Society as a Contested Concept. In J. van Dijck, T. Poell, & M. de Waal (Eds.), The Platform Society (p. 0). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190889760.003.0002 TikTok_Syllabus
  • Duffy, B. E., Poell, T., & Nieborg, D. B. (2019). Platform practices in the cultural industries: Creativity, labor, and citizenship. Social Media + Society, 5(4), 1–8. TikTok_Syllabus
  • Abidin, Crystal. (2019). Internet celebrity: Understanding fame online. Emerald Publishing Limited.
  • Introduction / Chapter 4 From Internet Celebrities to Influencers (vs special issue, both covered important concepts)

Further Reading

  • Gillespie, T. (2010). The politics of ‘platforms’. New Media & Society, 12(3), 347–364. doi:10.1177/1461444809342738
  • Burgress, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford University Press.
  • Van Dijck, José, and Thomas Poell. (2013). Understanding social media logic. Media and communication 1.1: 2-14.
  • Helmond, A. (2015). The platformization of the web: Making web data platform ready. Social media+ society, 1(2), 2056305115603080.
  • Steinberg, M. (2020). LINE as super app: Platformization in East Asia. Social Media+ Society, 6(2), 2056305120933285.
  • Kaye, D. B. V., Chen, X., & Zeng, J. (2021). The co-evolution of two Chinese mobile short video apps: Parallel platformization of Douyin and TikTok. Mobile Media & Communication, 9(2), 229-253. Tiktok_Syllabus Duffy_Syllabus
  • Poell, T., Nieborg, D. B., & Duffy, B. E. (2021). Platforms and cultural production. John Wiley & Sons.

Rationale

This course considers the students new to the fields of digital culture studies, platform studies, and communication studies in general. Therefore, this module is set to help students understand some of the threads that I deem essential for understanding common assumptions and analytical axes underlying later frameworks. These include how participation or consumer agency shapes the mediascape (Jenkins 2009), the "social" dimension of "social media" (Couldry & van Dijck 2015), and the concepts and applications of "platform society" (van Dijck 2018), "cultural industries" (Duffy et al. 2019), and "celebrity" (Crystal 2019).

The resulting selection reflects the heavy influence from the TikTok Syllabus. The pedagogical takeaway is prioritizing digestibleness than influence, as in the selection of Jenkins's (2009) blog instead of the introduction of Spreadable Media (2013). The TikTok Syllabus's preference for special issue introductions also introduces them as the "where and how" to capture and analyze current academic trends, a technique crucial for my preliminary reviews of unfamiliar fields and conducive to building my reading list.