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. If you are attending ICA, please join us for a launch event “BLUE SKY: Mapping Platform Asia: A Collaborative Inquiry into Global Digital Futures” at upcoming International Communication Association Conference at Cape Town, South Africa on Monday 6/8 from 8:15 am to 10:15 am at Edward & Schappen (Westin, Mezzanine Level).
From Platform Capitalism to Digital China<https://journals.sagepub.com/topic/collections-sms/sms-1_from_platform_capitalism_to_digital_china?publicationCode=sms> 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.
Platform Economies in Digital Asia<https://journals.sagepub.com/topic/collections-sms/sms-1_platform_economies_in_digital_asia?publicationCode=sms> 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. Jingyan Elaine Yuan Professor & Director of Graduate Studies Department of Communication University of Illinois at Chicago