David Nieborg

David B. Nieborg is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough with a graduate appointment at the Faculty of Information. He holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam and held visiting and fellowship appointments with MIT, the Queensland University of Technology, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. David published on the game industry, apps and platform economics, and games journalism in academic outlets such as New Media & Society, Social Media + Society and Media, Culture and Society. He is the co-author of Platforms and Cultural Production (Polity, 2021). His research has been supported by grants from the University of Amsterdam, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

Social media, platforms, globalization, political economy, games

Platform studies, app studies, political economy, cultural production

2021 - Partnership Grant (SSHRC, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada). “Global Media and Internet Concentration Project” (2021-2028)
2020 - Knowledge Synthesis Grant (SSHRC). “The Impact of Digital Platforms on Canadian Media Production” (2020-2021)
2019 - Project Grant (CIHR, Canadian Institutes of Health Research). “E-GAMES Canada: la monétisation des jeux à l'ère des technologies mobiles et du numérique” (2019-2023)

Poell, T., Nieborg, D. B., & Duffy, B. E. (2021). Platforms and Cultural Production. Polity. https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509540501

Nieborg, David B. Apps of Empire: Global capitalism and the app economy. Games & Culture, 16(3), 305-316. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412020937826

Nieborg, D. B., Young, C. J., & Joseph, D. J. (2020). App Imperialism: The Political Economy of the Canadian App Store. Social Media + Society, 6(2), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120933293

Rietveld, J., Ploog, J. N., & Nieborg, D. B. (2020). The coevolution of platform dominance and governance strategies: Effects on complementor performance outcomes. Academy of Management Discoveries, 6(3), 488–513. https://doi.org/10.5465/amd.2019.0064

Nieborg, D. B., & Helmond, A. (2019). The political economy of Facebook’s platformization in the mobile ecosystem: Facebook Messenger as a platform instance. Media, Culture & Society, 41(2), 196–218. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718818384 

Helmond, A., Nieborg, D. B., & van der Vlist, F. N. (2019). Facebook’s evolution: Development of a platform-as-infrastructure. Internet Histories, 3(2), 123–146. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2019.1593667

Nieborg, D. B., & Poell, T. (2018). The platformization of cultural production: Theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. New Media & Society, 20(11), 4275–4292. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694

App Studies Initiative

Critical Digital Methods Institute