Digital Platforms Resilience across Time and Space: Insights from Panarchy

Digital platforms have deeply integrated into society, significantly affecting markets, cultural practices, and institutional structures, leading to a reevaluation of political and legal frameworks to accommodate these changes. Their impact extends beyond merely reflecting societal changes; they actively shape and construct social norms and market dynamics at both individual (micro) and systemic (macro) levels. This influence manifests at different rates and organizational levels, from individual behaviors to large-scale institutional and market structures, potentially fostering innovation or creating vulnerabilities. Adopting a panarchy perspective, this work aims to explore digital platforms’ influence across multiple levels of organizing and time horizons, addressing a gap in the literature that often considers these impacts in isolation. The connectedness across these levels can determine a system’s resilience and its potential for transformation, particularly following crises. The study calls for an integrated approach to examine digital platforms, recognizing their roles as intricate components within a wider socioecological and sociotechnical network, and highlights the need to understand their long-term effects on socioecological and sociotechnical equilibria.