Platform Society: Towards a Genesis History
This article is devoted to the theoretical understanding of the genesis of "platform society" and the identification of its heuristic potential for analyzing modern transformations of communication and social interaction. The relevance of the study is due to the transformation of digital platforms into a key infrastructure for the production, dissemination, and consumption of information, as well as the formation of new regimes of power, economic models, and ways of constructing social reality. Despite the widespread use of the term, its historical and theoretical development and internal semantic transformations remain insufficiently systematized, which complicates the conceptualization of algorithmic governance and the platformization of publicness. The novelty of the approach lies in reconstructing the genesis of the phenomenon from early ideas about personalized information space in the late 20th century to modern critical theories of algorithmic power. The paper shows that the transition from a broadcast communication model to a platform infrastructure was accompanied not only by technological innovations but also by a profound restructuring of the logic of social choice, mechanisms of information filtering, and principles of public knowledge formation. It is argued that the commercial imperative of platforms has become a key factor in the comprehensive metricization of social space, the institutionalization of algorithmic selection, and the transformation of publicness into a managed environment of predictive analytics. As a result of the study, it is concluded that “platform society” represents a qualitatively new type of socio-technical organization in which communication infrastructure simultaneously performs economic, cognitive, and power functions. It is shown that algorithmic personalization acts as a mechanism for structuring social experience, influencing political behavior and cultural dynamics. The conclusion is drawn about the need for further development of critical platform theory, focused on analyzing the relationship between commercial interests, algorithmic governance, and the public good, as well as on finding alternative models of organization.
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The study was supported by the Russian Science Foundation, Project No. 25-28-03315 “Chronopolitical regimes of modern ideological projects”.