Digital Island: Ireland, Media and the Digital Transition

Digital Island: From Nation to Node examines how Ireland became a central infrastructural hub for global platform capitalism and, in the process, was transformed from a small national media system into a strategic node within transnational digital ecosystems. Moving beyond familiar accounts of tax policy or foreign direct investment, the book argues that Ireland's role in the platform economy reveals deeper changes in how states, media systems, and everyday life are reorganised under conditions of digital capitalism. Drawing on political economy, media sociology, and phenomenology, the book traces Ireland's digital transformation across telecommunications liberalisation, television's transition to digital media, the rise of participatory platforms, and the growing concentration of AI infrastructure. Through these developments, Digital Island demonstrates how platform firms increasingly shape not only markets and governance structures, but also cultural production, labour relations, institutional priorities, and forms of social experience. At the centre of the study is the argument that Ireland has become simultaneously a gateway for multinational technology firms into Europe, a regulatory and infrastructural partner within platform ecosystems, and a state struggling to preserve democratic communication, public service values, and cultural autonomy while embedded within global circuits of accumulation. To explain these transformations, the book develops a series of original theoretical concepts — including "ecosystem capitalism," "automated legitimation," and "phenomenological capture" — that together provide a framework for understanding how digital platforms extend power across institutions, infrastructures, and embodied experience itself. By positioning Ireland as an especially revealing case within wider global processes, Digital Island offers a major contribution to media and communication studies, platform studies, digital political economy, and critical internet research. Combining structural analysis with close attention to lived experience and institutional transformation, the book will be essential reading for scholars, policymakers, regulators, journalists, and readers interested in the changing relationship between technology, governance, media, and contemporary capitalism.