معرفی
Thomas Poell is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam. His scholarly work sits at the intersection of digital media studies, platform studies, and political communication, with a focus on how digital platforms reshape public communication and cultural production.
Poell's research interests primarily center on platformization processes and their societal implications. His influential work examines how digital platforms mediate public communication, with particular attention to protest movements, multilingual communication, and the transformation of cultural industries. He has made significant contributions to understanding the political economy of platforms, platform power dynamics, and the evolving relationship between platforms and public values. His methodological approach combines qualitative analysis of platform architectures with empirical studies of user practices across different cultural and linguistic contexts.
Analysis of Poell's recent publications reveals a clear trajectory from studying social media's role in political movements to examining broader platformization processes. His work increasingly focuses on platform power across specialized domains including medical imaging, advertising ecosystems, and news industries. A consistent thread throughout his scholarship is examining how platform architectures shape communication practices and power relations, with growing attention to issues of visibility, governance, and equity in platformized environments.
Poell has made significant contributions to the field through his co-authored book The Platform Society (2018), which established foundational concepts for understanding how digital platforms transform various sectors of society. He has also co-edited Global Cultures of Contestation (2017) and The Sage Handbook of Social Media (2018), demonstrating his leadership in synthesizing scholarly knowledge about digital media and platform dynamics.
His influential article "Twitter as a multilingual space: The articulation of the Tunisian revolution" exemplifies his approach to studying platform-mediated communication during political upheavals. This work demonstrated how Twitter functioned as a global communication space during the Tunisian revolution, with different language communities articulating distinct accounts of the revolution while remaining interconnected through strategic language use by key activists.
