Trends in the area of “Platform society”

Yuri Rykov, the Research Fellow of LINIS, presented his report at International conference The Internet, Policy & Politics in Oxford University.

The conference take place every two years in Oxford Internet Institute and it is devoted to actual topics such as, for example, crowdsourcing or big data. This year the main topic was "Platform Society", focused on social effects and repercussions of various Internet-platforms, such as Facebook, Reddit, Amazon and grown in popularity Uber, Airbnb etc.

Yuri presented the results of his dissertation thesis’ "How network and participation inequalities change across different types of groups within the same online platform (VK.com SNS)". He demonstrated that variability of Internet users behavior (in particular, intra-group connections and activity) could be explained by motivation of actors to participate in online community and by the mission of such community. The main message of his report was to pay attention to social predictors of technologies usage by studying human behavior and impact of various Internet-platforms.

Yuri noted that it occurred several new trends in Internet studies. At first, the Internet-platform Reddit gets the wide popularity among researches, and it is not surprising after “losing” access to Facebook and to Instagram and “satiety” of Twitter. Another significant trend is a renewed sense of the importance of diversity Internet user’s characteristics. In this way, the theme of inequality was reflected in one of the most memorable conference panel devoted to reputation and popularity of users.

One of exciting part of conference were traditional buffets in city museums that gave an opportunity to feel the especial status of Oxford, to experience unique atmosphere and to hang out with the academic crowd.