The Political Economy of New Media Revisited

Abstract

This paper defines media platforms in terms of the theory of traditional two-sided media markets, then goes on to develop the theory to include content providers as a third side of the market (the “platformisation of media”), the widespread introduction of sellable meta-information about the platform network (the “mediatisation of platforms”), and the importance of social networking technologies to the media platform. Issues of concern raised by this include privacy, intellectual property, and equity. Genres of resistance to unwanted visibility and invisibility, such as spoofing, spamming, fingering and silencing are also noted.