FIELD GUIDE: Understanding Narrative Power & Platform Systems
This guide maps the intellectual terrain for understanding how narrative, media, and platform systems shape public discourse and democratic life. It’s organized by domain and designed as a resource for researchers, advocates, educators, and organizations working at the intersection of communication, policy, and power. The thinkers and frameworks here inform my work, and represent essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how meaning is made, contested, and governed in the digital age.
Narrative Framing & Meaning making
George Lakoff — Framing & cognitive linguistics
Erving Goffman — Frame Analysis
Murray Edelman — Political language & symbolism
David Snow & Robert Benford — collective action frames
Jerome Bruner — narrative psychology
Walter Fisher — narrative paradigm
Kenneth Burke — dramatism, motives, rhetoric
Roland Barthes — mythologies, semiotics
Hayden White — narrative and history
Stuart Hall — encoding/decoding, cultural meaning
PLATFORM STUDIES & ALGORITHMIC SYSTEMS
Tarleton Gillespie — platform governance
José van Dijck — platform society
Shoshana Zuboff — surveillance capitalism
Safiya Noble — algorithmic bias
Ruha Benjamin — race + technology
Nick Srnicek — platform capitalism
Wendy Chun — habit, software ideology
danah boyd — networked publics
Helen Nissenbaum — contextual integrity
Frank Pasquale — algorithmic accountability
POLITICAL ECONOMY & CORPORATE POWER
Karl Polanyi — embedded markets
David Harvey — neoliberalism
Thomas Piketty — inequality
Robert McChesney — media & capitalism
Herbert Schiller — corporate media
Theodore Adorno — culture industry
Mancur Olson — collective action
Sheila Jasanoff — co-production, governance
C. Wright Mills — power elite
William Davies — neoliberal consciousness
Visual Culture, Semiotics & Image Politics
John Berger — ways of seeing
W.J.T. Mitchell — picture theory
Susan Sontag — photography, suffering
Ariella Azoulay — civil imagination
Nicholas Mirzoeff — visuality, countervisuality
Gunther Kress & Theo van Leeuwen — visual grammar
Vilém Flusser — technical images
Hito Steyerl — media, circulation, politics
Deborah Poole — vision and power
Abigail Solomon-Godeau — critical image theory
MEDIA & COMMUNICATION THEORY
Marshall McLuhan — the medium is the message
Neil Postman — media ecology, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”
Harold Innis — time-biased vs space-biased media
James Carey — ritual vs transmission models
Joshua Meyrowitz — no sense of place
Paul Virilio — speed, visibility, dromology
Lev Manovich — new media theory
Douglas Rushkoff — media rhythms, digital culture
Maryanne Wolf — reading brain, cognitive shifts
Brian Massumi — affect, sensation, mediated experience
POWER, DISCOURSE & THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Michel Foucault — power/knowledge, discourse
Jürgen Habermas — public sphere
Antonio Gramsci — hegemony
Hannah Arendt — public realm, political action
Pierre Bourdieu — symbolic power
Judith Butler — performativity, norms
Gayatri Spivak — subaltern voice
Nancy Fraser — counterpublics
John Dewey — democracy as communication
Noam Chomsky — manufacturing consent
TECHNOPOLITICS, GOVERNANCE, STATECRAFT
Langdon Winner — “Do artifacts have politics?”
Benjamin Bratton — planetary-scale computation
James C. Scott — legibility, state simplification
Sheila Jasanoff — tech governance
Malcolm Sparrow — regulatory craft
Zeynep Tufekci — protest, networks
Virginia Eubanks — welfare automation
Rob Kitchin — smart cities, algorithmic governance
Philip Agre — capture model
Trebor Scholz — platform cooperativism (your ecosystem)
Digital Democracy, Public Voice & Civic Literacy
Yochai Benkler — networked public sphere
Zizi Papacharissi — affective publics
Taina Bucher — algorithmic publics
Stephen Coleman — political communication
Chantal Mouffe — agonistic democracy
Cass Sunstein — information architecture
Ethan Zuckerman — digital civic space
Michael Schudson — democratic communication
Paolo Gerbaudo — digital movements
Chris Bail — virality & polarization