Thomas Poell is Professor of Data, Culture & Institutions at the University of Amsterdam and director of the Research Priority Area on Global Digital Cultures. His research is focused on the societal consequences of the rise of digital platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Spotify, and WeChat. He has published extensively on social media and popular protests in Canada, Egypt, Tunisia, India and China, as well as on the role of these media in the development of new forms of journalism. Together with Olav Velthuis, he is currently leading an NWO-funded research project on The platformization of the global sex industry. In the coming years, Poell will focus on the digitisation of cultural institutions in the light of the proliferation of data, the growing importance of AI, and the rise of major platform corporations. He will stimulate and develop new research on this transformation, which leads to a reorganization and rethinking of museums, libraries, and archives, as well as to creative and economic upheaval in the television, music, games, and news industries. Particular attention will be devoted to regional variations in how these changes unfold and what the political and cultural implications are.

 

Poell is co-author of Platforms and Cultural Production with David Nieborg and Brooke Erin Duffy (Polity, 2021) and The Platform Society with José van Dijck and Martijn de Waal (Oxford University Press, 2018). Furthermore, he co-edited The Sage Handbook of Social Media (Sage, 2018), Social Media Materialities and Protest (Routledge, 2018), and Global Cultures of Contestation (Palgrave/McMillan, 2017).