EUMEPLAT, European media platforms: assessing positive and negative externalities for European culture

The EUMEPLAT project aims at analyzing the role of media platforms in fostering or dismantling European identity.

The assumption we will draw on is that European dimension has rarely been dominant in media history. In most cases – i.e., movie – market shares are mainly divided among national productions and imports from the most influential countries. In broadcasting both regional and national patterns emerge, with properly European exchanges being the exception more than the rule. Web platforms are usually owned by US companies, with a new threat appearing in our media landscape.

We will focus on the “platformization” process, as the rise of new closed Web architectures, so as to inquire its positive and negative externalities, functional and dis-functional consequences. Positive externalities are beneficial to society at large, in a way that explains the overall ambition of the project. Detecting the insurgence of negative effects is a fundamental duty for scholars and policy-makers, as externalities of both kinds tend to reinforce themselves, giving rise to positive loop feedback and critical vicious circles.

Negative externalities include misinformation, toxic debate, exclusion of independent voices; positive externalities encompass European co-productions, or practices able to bring people out of the information bubble. For this purpose, we will run a multidisciplinary analysis of platformization in three fields: news, video sharing, media representations, with the final goal to offer a theoretical synthesis. The research question is whether or not new platforms – YouTube, Netflix, NewsFeed – are making European culture more European, based on indicators related to production, consumption and representation. Patterns will be detected by comparing national, regional and European and level. Advanced methods will be applied for data analysis, so as to provide guidelines for decision-makers (i.e., fake news prevention; best practices in co-productions).