Call for abstracts: Platformed bodies
Over the last couple of decades, the global social, political and economic landscape has been marked by rise and dominance of social media. These transnational owned social media and communication services fundamentally alter both the ways economic value is produced, as well as the fundamental ways that social life is lived. To understand this dual impact we have seen a wealth of theoretical innovation, with platform studies proven to be an immensely powerful instance (Gillespie, 2010; Van Dijck, et al., 2018). In an early work, Van Dijck supplies a key intervention when suggesting that techno-cultural constructs and socioeconomic structures should be integrated in an ecological approach to better capture “the mutual shaping of social media and the culture of connectivity” (Van Dijck, 2013, 26). In other words, intertwining cultural and economic analysis is key for understanding the current moment in which digital platforms, services and devices are of increasing importance to more and more aspects of society and everyday life.
In this analysis however, the question of the body as a somatic reality, a social construct, and a site of experience and contestation, is less clear. It is this intersection that this special issue of MedieKultur takes aim at. We invite submissions that combine analysis of platforms and the body.
