Adrian Mackenzie
1000 Platforms: Ensembles as Ontological Experiments
Bristol University Press, 2025
In today's digital world, platforms are everywhere, shaping our social and cultural landscapes. This groundbreaking book shows how platforms are not just technical systems, but complex networks involving diverse people, practices and values. It explores a wide range of digital platforms, using insights from science and technology studies, anthropology, sociology and cultural theories to offer fresh perspectives on how platforms, media and devices function and evolve.
Blending ethnographic work with technical analysis, this is essential reading for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the digital age.
About the Author
Adrian Mackenzie is a leading scholar of science and technology studies, media and cultural studies, and social and cultural theory. His current interests focus on network and computational media, digital sociology and innovation in data-related methods. He is the author of Machine Learners: Archaeology of a Data Practice (MIT Press, 2017), Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures (MIT Press, 2010), Cutting Code: Software and Sociology (Peter Lang, 2006) and Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (Continuum, 2002). He has recently published articles on the capitalization of online platforms, device-specific events, consumer genomics, and DNA-based biosensing. Professor Mackenzie is a co-editor of the journal Big Data and Society.
