[Commlist] Special Issue on Asian Platform Economies from Social Media + Society

Over the past few years, conversations around platforms, AI, and other 
new technologies have become harder to separate from questions of 
infrastructure, state power, labor, and global reordering. These two 
/Social Media + Society/ special issues below explore those questions 
through China and Asia—not as peripheral cases, but as places from which 
new concepts and debates can emerge.


*Platform Economies in Digital Asia*
This collection brings together leading and emerging scholars to rethink 
both “platform” and “Asia” as dynamic, contested imaginaries—rather than 
fixed objects of analysis. We organize the special issue around four 
productive tensions: (1) technological/media affordances vs. cultural 
specificities; (2) methodological localism vs. theory-building; (3) 
state power vs. transnationalism; and (4) inter-Asia references vs. 
power inequalities. Across these frictions, contributors trace 
alternative genealogies. From Japanese convenience stores to K-pop 
fandoms, from Chinese superapps to Indian short-video platforms, they 
explore how Asia’s diverse experiences of platformization reshape global 
debates on labor, governance, and post-neoliberal futures.


Link to the special issue: 
https://journals.sagepub.com/topic/collections-sms/sms-1_platform_economies_in_digital_asia?publicationCode=sms 



*From Platform Capitalism to Digital China*
This collection brings together critical scholars of China’s digital 
transformation to rethink “platform capitalism” through the historical, 
political, and geopolitical trajectories of Digital China. Moving beyond 
universalized models of platformization, the contributors examine how 
platforms in China operate simultaneously as infrastructures, governance 
technologies, and developmental projects. From superapps and state 
platforms to logistics networks, cloud infrastructures, and 
transnational digital expansion, the collection explores how evolving 
relations among the state, capital, labor, and technology reshape 
debates on platform governance, infrastructural power, and 
techno-geopolitics in a fragmented global order.

Link to the special issue: 
https://journals.sagepub.com/topic/collections-sms/sms-1_from_platform_capitalism_to_digital_china?publicationCode=sms 




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