On the externalities of news platformization

An assessment of scientific literature

Abstract

The aim of the article is to assess the debate about news platformizations, by means of a wide-scale bibliographical review. Scientific literature has been organized along two axes: the marked or unmarked definition of news platformization; and the strong or weak understanding of its externalities. By weak definition, we mean all cases in which platform and platformization are used as being synonyms of other categories: namely, social media, websites, digital services; or digitization, remediation, and mediatization. By strong definition, we rather refer to the analyses premised on the specialist literature about platformization, and making space for more peculiar concepts such as, for instance, externalities or multi-sided markets. Externalities can be defined as weak or strong, then, based on whether or not the effects of the process seriously modify the economic, social, political or cultural assets of the information society. For the sake of simplicity, we will group the scientific clusters in the following order: weak definition and weak externalities effects; weak definition and strong externalities effects; strong definition and weak externalities effects; strong definition and strong externalities effects. The positive/negative effects dyad will be considered too: though it has not been used as a pivotal variable for the drawing of the quadrants, as most cases would fall in the middle of the continuum, and several authors take an uncertain position.