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The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connected World explores what the title promises, first presenting a clear and useful exploration of today’s platform ecosystem and culminating with a larger set of theoretical questions asking if and how platforms should consider ‘public values’ in their design. Authors Van Dijck, Poell and De Waal thoughtfully lay out this exploration, grounding it in an in-depth mapping of the underlying infrastructure of the platforms that have become not only ubiquitous in our society, but have emerged as governing actors within it. Expanded from the authors’ work on a 2016 Dutch report, the book acknowledges the hope to speak to a wider academic audience, particularly students and cross-disciplinary scholars. The front matter reflexively addresses the ever-evolving digital landscape in which it was written and foregrounds its findings with the caveat that fast-paced governmental, societal and corporate evolution makes it stand on shifting sands. This serves not only as an honest context for the book, but a reminder for other researchers to understand the temporal nature of studying emerging technologies. Despite this inherent challenge to studying platforms, this monograph successfully makes visible their practices, infrastructure and interests that are often obscured from non-corporate researchers, therefore providing a most useful foundation for scholars to reference when studying platforms. This book draws on a wealth of scholarship from a diverse range of disciplines and also turns to media coverage, policy and information provided by the platforms themselves to construct a wide and thorough representation of the platform ecosystem. As a result, it formally brings this knowledge to academia in a comprehensive way. It is structured like a manual, clearly organized into thematic chapters that contain distinct insights delineated by sub-sections to guide the reader through its intellectual project. The introduction gives a helpful guide to reading the book and weaves together larger themes that chapters address both individually and in concert with each other. The first two chapters are the most widely useful to cultural sociologists as they chart the landscape for the platform society that the rest of the book will explore and deconstruct through examples. They give helpful written and visual diagrams of the platform ecosystem, noting that the vast majority of it is influenced by five dominating players: 959306 CUS0010.1177/1749975520959306Cultural SociologyBook Review book-review2020