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7:45

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Curriculum Integration Forum · Summer 2026

Platform
Society

How Digital Platforms Shape Everyday Life

Department of Media Studies and Journalism

University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh

Professor Muzaffar Ahmed Chowdhury Auditorium,
Faculty of Social Science, University of Dhaka

↓ Begin the Day

7:45

TUESDAY · BATA SIGNAL, DHAKA

f

Facebook12 Friends Reacted to a Post You'll Want to See

3:02 am

▶

YouTubeNew From a Channel You Watch: "Why Prices Went Up"

3:14 am

🗳

SnapchatRafa Added to Their Story · 3 New Snaps

3:27 am

৳

bKashCashback Offer Ends Today, Open to Claim

3:38 am

♬

Discord"Squad" Server: 4 Mentions While You Slept

3:46 am

♫

TikTok3 Creators You Follow Just Went Live

3:52 am

Farhan Isn't Even Awake Yet.

6 Companies Already Are. In Fact, They Never Slept.

Meet Farhan

Media Studies and Journalism.
5th Semester. Lives in Bata Signal.

Before He Reaches Campus Today, How Many Apps Will He Open?

1-3 Apps

4-6 Apps

7-9 Apps

More Than He'd Admit

Honest Answer: More Than He'd Admit.

08:05 · The Morning Feed

Farhan's Newspaper Is Now a Feed.

Tap a Post: Why Did He See It?

A Page He Liked Once

"Breaking: Fuel Price Change From Midnight"

Shown because it is getting fast reactions in Dhaka right now.

A Cousin Reshared

A Rumour, Screenshotted, No Source

Shown because people like Farhan engaged with it.

Three Taps.
One Record.

Cash leaves no trace. bKash and Nagad leave a perfect one: who, where, how much, how often.

1 · Open Wallet

2 · Enter PIN

3 · Confirm ৳210

Every payment is also a data point dropping into a lake only the platform can see.

Data Lake · Transactions Become a Profile of You

11 am · The Family Hustle

His Elder Sister's Shop Has No Website.
Just a Page.

She sells dresses on Facebook Live. Comments become orders. bKash confirms them. A rider delivers.

For millions of Bangladeshis, the platform is not a tool for business, it is the marketplace.

🔴 LIVE · "Eid Collection"

Nabila: Shundor ❤ Daam Koto?
Sadman: Chikon Pin er Charger Lagbe Karo?
Rumman: Noakhali Bivaag Chai
Alvi: Back 2 Back
+ 142 Watching

13:20 · Lunch and Class

Even Learning Is Platformed.

foodpanda

Lunch arrives in 18 minutes, and the app now knows what he eats, when, and how late he leaves it.

Google Classroom

Assignments, attendance, grades. His education runs on a company's servers, abroad.

YouTube Tutorials

He learns editing from a creator, not a syllabus. The algorithm picks the teacher.

ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude

The first thing he asks when stuck. Convenient, and quietly logged.

When classrooms move onto platforms, public values like privacy and equal access are suddenly up for grabs.

18:30 · Evening Run by the Lake

His Body Is a Data Stream.

152 bpm

Heart Rate

97 %

Blood Oxygen

4.2 km

Distance

312 kcal

Calories

The fitness app tracks his heartbeat, pace, route, and sleep. Health is becoming just another feed of data flowing to servers he will never see.

23:40 · Just Five More Reels

The Feed Never Ends.

A dancing scuba cat. A cooking hack. A duet. Farhan's humour, his slang, his sense of what is normal, increasingly shaped by an infinite, auto-playing stream.

Youth culture in Bangladesh now has a co-author: the recommendation algorithm.

🎥 Scuba Cat Dances

@aquacat · 4.2M Views
❤ 812K 💬 9.1K ↺ 220K

01:20 · One More Match

Hanging Out on Discord.

Voice chat with friends while gaming. Laughter, plans, inside jokes. His social life now lives inside a private company's servers too.

Even friendship and downtime are logged, hosted, and monetised somewhere far away.

$PUBG Mobile gameplay$

♬ Squad · Voice

🔴 Rafa, Sadman, Alvi in Call
"Ek Game ar Then Ghum"
01:20 am

02:15 · Lights Off

Every Tap Felt Like His Choice.

News, the ride, the payment, the shop, lunch, class, the run, the scroll, the game. Nine separate apps. Nine separate decisions.

0

Data Points Farhan Handed Over Today, Without Ever Choosing To

None of These Were Separate↓

The Concept

This Is a
Platform Society.

Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Google and Apple are no longer just communication tools. They have become the infrastructure through which social, cultural, economic and political life is organised.

CommunicationNewsCommerceTransportEducationHealthEntertainmentPolitics

José van Dijck, Thomas Poell & Martijn de Waal, The Platform Society (2018)

Theoretical Framework

What Is a Platform?

Not just an app. A programmable architecture built to organise interactions between users, around four building blocks:

Data & Algorithms

What it collects, and the rules that decide what happens with it.

Interfaces

The buttons, feeds and prompts that quietly steer what you do.

Ownership & Business Model

Who controls it, and how it turns your activity into money.

Terms of Service

The rules you agree to without reading, that they can change anytime.

As more of life moves onto these structures, the authors call the process platformization.

The Infrastructural Core

Five Companies Own Not All, but Most of the Infrastructure.

Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft logos

Tap an App: See Whose Backbone It Uses.

PathaoGoogle Maps

YouTubeOwned by Google

F-CommerceMeta

iPhone AppsApple App Store

NetflixAmazon AWS

His LaptopWindows + Copilot

DiscordRuns on Google Cloud

TikTokByteDance, the Outlier

↓ All Built on Top Of ↓

Google

Alphabet

Apple

iOS · Devices

One Figure, the Whole Ecosystem.

Figure 1.1: the infrastructural services of the Big Five platform corporations

Figure 1.1 · Infrastructural services of the Big Five, proportional to their weight in the ecosystem. van Dijck, Poell & de Waal (2018); figure by Fernando van der Vlist.

Two Layers, One Dependency

Sectoral Platforms

Serve one sector: Pathao (transport), Daraz (retail), Coursera (education), F-commerce shops. The apps Farhan actually touches.

Infrastructural Platforms (GAFAM)

Search, cloud, maps, app stores, identity logins, payment and ad networks. The backbone everything else is built on.

Sectoral platforms cannot function without the infrastructural core beneath them.

MECHANISM 01

Datafication

Turning life into data that can be tracked, stored and predicted.

Before

A morning jog was just a jog. A bus ride was just a ride. They happened, then they were gone. Nobody recorded your heartbeat or your route.

Now

Farhan's run becomes heartbeat data. His ride becomes location data. His ৳210 becomes transaction data. Even his pauses and typos become behaviour data.

MECHANISM 02

Commodification

Turning activities, emotions and ideas into things that can be traded.

Before

You paid a shop with money for a product. Simple. Your attention and your friendships were not for sale.

Now

Farhan never paid Facebook a taka. He is the product. Value is traded in four currencies:

◦ Attention◦ Data◦ Users◦ Money

MECHANISM 03

Selection

Deciding what you see, and what stays invisible.

Before

A newspaper editor chose the front page. A teacher picked the reading. A person you could name decided what was worth your attention, guided by professional judgement.

Now

An algorithm ranks Farhan's feed, hides the reported story below the rumour, and picks his next reel. Selection runs on personalisation, trends and reputation, and moderation, inside a box he cannot question.

So What Is at Stake?

Public Values.

When private mechanisms run public life, things we share as a society get squeezed.

Tap a Value for Its Bangladesh Face.

Accuracy

Trustworthy information

Misinformation and rumour in feeds

Privacy

Control of your data

Surveillance, leaked numbers

Journalism

Independent reporting

Newsrooms losing ad revenue

Safety

Freedom from harm

Online harassment, doxxing

Fairness

A level field

Sellers at the mercy of reach

Democracy

Who can be heard

Visibility decided by algorithms

This is the heart of the book: not "are platforms good or bad," but which values we let them override.

National Election 2026

When Selection Becomes a Weapon.

Bot accounts, bought reactions and coordinated propaganda now flood feeds before a vote, manufacturing what looks like public opinion.

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

The Daily Star · Investigative

Fake 'Haha' Reactions Attack Political Opponents Ahead of Elections

An investigation analysed about 8,500 "haha" reactions. Roughly 1 in 5 came from suspicious bot profiles, bought online to attack opponents and fake support across parties.

thedailystar.net · February 2026

The same machinery that picks Farhan's reels can quietly shape an election.

The Global South Question

Designed There. Lived Here.

The rules Farhan lives inside were written in California, on US values, then exported to Dhaka, where the laws, the language and the stakes are different.

The Asymmetry, and the Catch

You Make the Value.
They Own the Foundations.

Farhan supplies the data, the content, the attention. The platform owns the algorithm, sets the prices, writes the rules, and can change them overnight.

One Quiet Change, Made Abroad

When Facebook adjusted how Pages rank, Farhan's elder sister woke up to half the reach and half the orders. A single tweak in California reshaped a Dhaka household's income overnight.

But the power is not only one way. A platform lives or dies by what users do together. If enough people leave, or push back, the network breaks. That collective choice is the opening.

What This Asks of You

Not "Delete the Apps."
See the Infrastructure.

Digital citizenship is the habit of asking, every time: who built this, who profits, who is made visible, and who is left out?

Critical AwarenessAccountabilityPrivacyEthics

The Takeaway

You Think You're Using the Platform.
The Platform Is Using You Too.

Thank You.

Sources

van Dijck, Poell & de Waal, The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World (Oxford University Press, 2018)
van Dijck, Nieborg & Poell, "Reframing Platform Power," Internet Policy Review 8(2), 2019
The Daily Star, "Fake 'Haha' Reactions Attack Political Opponents Ahead of Elections" (Feb 2026)

GPS Trail	Every turn from Bata Signal to ULAB, logged
Pickup & Drop	Home address linked to campus
Time of Day	His daily routine, learned over weeks
Device & Battery	A low battery can mean a higher price
Payment ID	Ride tied to his bKash profile

PlatformSociety

Media Studies and Journalism.5th Semester. Lives in Bata Signal.

Farhan's Newspaper Is Now a Feed.

Three Taps.One Record.

His Elder Sister's Shop Has No Website.Just a Page.

Even Learning Is Platformed.

foodpanda

Google Classroom

YouTube Tutorials

ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude

His Body Is a Data Stream.

The Feed Never Ends.

Hanging Out on Discord.

Every Tap Felt Like His Choice.

This Is aPlatform Society.

What Is a Platform?

Data & Algorithms

Interfaces

Ownership & Business Model

Terms of Service

Five Companies Own Not All, but Most of the Infrastructure.

One Figure, the Whole Ecosystem.

Sectoral Platforms

Infrastructural Platforms (GAFAM)

Datafication

Commodification

Selection

Public Values.

Accuracy

Privacy

Journalism

Safety

Fairness

Democracy

When Selection Becomes a Weapon.

Fake 'Haha' Reactions Attack Political Opponents Ahead of Elections

Designed There. Lived Here.

You Make the Value.They Own the Foundations.

Not "Delete the Apps."See the Infrastructure.

Thank You.

Platform
Society

Media Studies and Journalism.
5th Semester. Lives in Bata Signal.

Three Taps.
One Record.

His Elder Sister's Shop Has No Website.
Just a Page.

This Is a
Platform Society.

You Make the Value.
They Own the Foundations.

Not "Delete the Apps."
See the Infrastructure.