José van Dijck researches social media, media technologies and digital culture. She studied at Utrecht University and gained her PhD at the University of California, San Diego. She was an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Groningen and an associate professor of media and visual culture at Maastricht University. In 2001, Van Dijck became a professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She chaired the department from 2002 to 2007 and became the Dean of Humanities in 2008, a position she held until 2011.

José van Dijck played a key role in the founding of CLARIAH, a consortium of humanities research institutes that includes four Academy institutes. Last year the consortium received twelve million euros from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) to develop a digital infrastructure that will facilitate cross-disciplinary data mining and, eventually, data linking in support of research on major multidisciplinary issues concerning culture and social change. Van Dijck has been a visiting professor and visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Technology in Sidney, and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book, The Culture of Connectivity. A Critical History of Social Media, was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press.