Nick Couldry

Social Theory and Digital Media Practice

Media, Society, World

Ulises A. Mejias

How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism

Costs of Connection

Just about any social need is now met with an opportunity to "connect" through digital means. But this convenience is not free—it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate profit. The Costs of Connection uncovers this process, this "data colonialism," and its designs for controlling our lives—our ways of knowing; our means of production; our political participation. Colonialism might seem like a thing of the past, but this book shows that the historic appropriation of land, bodies, and natural resources is mirrored today in this new era of pervasive datafication. Apps, platforms, and smart objects capture and translate our lives into data, and then extract information that is fed into capitalist enterprises and sold back to us. The authors argue that this development foreshadows the creation of a new social order emerging globally—and it must be challenged. Confronting the alarming degree of surveillance already tolerated, they offer a stirring call to decolonize the internet and emancipate our desire for connection.

The Costs of Connection

The New Colonialism of Big Tech (and How to Fight Back)

Data Grab

Over the past thirty years, humanity has made a huge mistake. We handed over to big tech decisions that have allowed them to build what has become our "space of the world" – the highly artificial space of social media platforms where much of our social life now unfolds. This has proved reckless and has huge social consequences. The toxic effects on social life, young people’s mental health, and political solidarity are well known, but the key factor underlying all this has been missed: the fact that humanity allowed business to construct our space of the world at all and then exploit it for profit. In the process, we ignored two millennia of political thought about the conditions under which a healthy or even a non-violent politics is possible. We endangered the one resource that is in desperately short supply in the face of catastrophic climate change: solidarity. Is human solidarity possible in a world of continuous digital connection and commercially managed platforms, and what if it isn’t? In the first book of his trilogy, Humanising the Future, Nick Couldry offers a radical new vision of how to design our digital spaces so that they build, rather than erode, both solidarity and community. This trenchant and vividly written book stresses that we cannot afford not to care for our space of the world. We need to rebuild it together.

Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What If It Can't?

The Space of the World

Ulises Mejias

¿Cuánto vale un tuit? ¿Cuánto cuesta "estar" en las redes sociales? ¿Cómo se explica el flujo constante (y excesivo) de información en un mundo supuestamente interconectado por la "democrática" Internet? Nick Couldry y Ulises Mejias intentan responder estas y otras tantas preguntas que surgen a propósito de lo que ellos han denominado colonización de datos. Si el colonialismo histórico anexaba territorios, sus recursos y los cuerpos que trabajaban en ellos, la acumulación de poder del colonialismo de datos es a la vez más simple y más profunda: la captura y el control de la propia vida humana a través de la apropiación de los datos que pueden extraerse de ella para obtener beneficios. Si esto es así, entonces, así como que el colonialismo histórico creó el combustible para el futuro ascenso del capitalismo industrial, de manera análoga el colonialismo de datos está allanando el camino para un capitalismo basado en la explotación de los datos. El costo de la conexión es una exploración profunda sobre cómo la permanente extracción de información sobre nuestras vidas íntimas está reconstruyendo tanto los mercados globales como nuestras personalidades. Este libro representa un paso enorme hacia la comprensión de la etapa actual del capitalismo, en la cual el insumo definitivo es la información más cruda de la vida humana. Naomi Klein

Cómo los datos colonizan la vida humanada y se la apropian para el capitalismo

El costo de la conexión

"One of the best books I have read in years about what it means to engage neoliberalism through a critical framework that highlights those narratives and stories that affirm both our humanity and our longing for justice. It should be read by everyone concerned with what it might mean to not only dream about democracy but to engage it as a lived experience and political possibility." - Henry Giroux, McMaster University "An important and original book that offers a fresh critique of neoliberalism and its contribution to the contemporary crisis of ‘voice’. Couldry’s own voice is clear and impassioned - an urgent must-read." - Rosalind Gill, King’s College London For more than thirty years neoliberalism has declared that market functioning trumps all other social, political and economic values. In this book, Nick Couldry passionately argues for voice, the effective opportunity for people to speak and be heard on what affects their lives, as the only value that can truly challenge neoliberal politics. But having voice is not enough: we need to know our voice matters. Insisting that the answer goes much deeper than simply calling for 'more voices', whether on the streets or in the media, Couldry presents a dazzling range of analysis from the real world of Blair and Obama to the social theory of Judith Butler and Amartya Sen. Why Voice Matters breaks open the contradictions in neoliberal thought and shows how the mainstream media not only fails to provide the means for people to give an account of themselves, but also reinforces neoliberal values. Moving beyond the despair common to much of today's analysis, Couldry shows us a vision of a democracy based on social cooperation and offers the resources we need to build a new post-neoliberal politics.

Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism

Why Voice Matters

Inside Culture offers a fresh and stimulating reassessment of the direction of cultural studies. Nick Couldry argues without apology for cultural studies as a discipline centred around the interrelations of culture and power, with a clear focus on accountable empirical research that deals with the real complexities of contemporary lives - `inside' culture. Chapters discuss the broad conceptual issues around `cultures', `texts', `the self', and the individual. There are detailed discussions of a range of cultural studies authors which demystify the elaborate language of contemporary cultural studies, with suggestions for further thinking at the end of chapters.

Re-imagining the Method of Cultural Studies

Inside Culture

Andreas Hepp

Social theory needs to be completely rethought in a world of digital media and social media platforms driven by data processes. Fifty years after Berger and Luckmann published their classic text The Social Construction of Reality, two leading sociologists of media, Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, revisit the question of how social theory can understand the processes through which an everyday world is constructed in and through media. Drawing on Schütz, Elias and many other social and media theorists, they ask: what are the implications of digital media's profound involvement in those processes? Is the result a social world that is stable and liveable, or one that is increasingly unstable and unliveable?

The Mediated Construction of Reality

Ulises Ali Mejias

"In the present day, Big Tech is extracting resources from us, transferring and centralizing resources from people to companies. These companies are grabbing our most basic natural resources--our data--exploiting our labor and connections, and repackaging our information to control our views, track our movements, record our conversations, and discriminate against us. These companies tell us this is for our own good, to build innovation and develop new technology. But in fact every time we unthinkingly click "Accept" on a set of Terms and Conditions, we allow our most personal information to be kept indefinitely, repackaged by companies to control and exploit us for their own profit. Each chapter of respected technology scholars Ulises Mejias and Nick Couldry's compelling book opens with a story of an ordinary person going about their life until they come up against technology taking their data: a migrant trying to reach Europe where drones are patrolling borders, a woman in the Philippines working for a software company that takes screenshots of her monitor, a food delivery driver in a Chinese city racing against an algorithm. All of these people could be us; the story of what tech companies are doing is a global story that is impossible to escape. Mejias and Couldry explain why postindustrial capitalism cannot be understood without colonialism, and why race is a critical factor in who benefits from data colonialism, just as it was for historic colonialism. In this searing, cutting-edge guide, two leading global researchers and founders of the concept of data colonialism reveal how history can help us understand the emerging future--and how we can fight back"--

The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back

JUST ABOUT ANY SOCIAL NEED is now met with an opportunity to "connect" through digital means. But this convenience is not free-it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations that use it to generate profit. The Costs of Connection uncovers this process, this "data colonialism," and its designs for controlling our lives-our ways of knowing; our means of production; our political participation. Colonialism might seem like a thing of the past, but this book shows that the historic appropriation of land, bodies, and natural resources is mirrored today in this new era of pervasive datafication. Apps, platforms, and smart objects capture and translate our lives into data, and then extract information that is fed into capitalist enterprises and sold back to us. The authors argue that this development foreshadows the emergence of a new global social order-and it must be challenged. Confronting the alarming degree of surveillance already tolerated, they offer a stirring call to decolonize the internet and emancipate our desire for connection.

The Costs Of Connection

Anna McCarthy

Media Space explores the importance of ideas of space and place to understanding the ways in which we experience the media in our everyday lives. Essays from leading international scholars address the kinds of space created by media and the effects that spacial arrangements have on media forms. Case studies focus on a wide variety of subjects and locales, from in-flight entertainment to mobile media such as personal stereos and mobile phones, and from the electronic spaces of the Internet to the shopping mall.

Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age

MediaSpace

This fascinating study focuses on an area neglected in previous studies of the media: the meetings between ordinary people and the media. Couldry explores what happens when people who normally consume the media witness media processes in action, or even become the object of media attention themselves.

Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age

The Place of Media Power

In this book Nick Couldry, media and cultural theorist from the London School of Economics, asks what are the priorities for media and cultural research today - at a time of the intensified mediation of all fields of social life, threats to democratic legitimacy, and serious instability on the global political stage. The book calls for a "decentered" media research that rejects easy assumptions about media's role in holding societies together and instead looks more critically at the difference media make on the ground to the material conditions of our lives. In what detailed ways do media transform knowledge and agency in daily life? How do media contribute to the culture of democratic politics? And, most difficult of all, how can we live, ethically, with and through media? Couldry's previous work is well known for its breadth, ranging across media sociology, media theory and cultural theory. Here he draws also on political theory and ethics to develop a tightly-argued account of how media and cultural research must now reorient itself if it is to remain relevant and critical. Nick Couldry is Reader in Media, Communications and Culture at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author or editor of five books including Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (Routledge 2003), The Place of Media Power (Routledge 2000) and (coedited with James Curran) Contesting Media Power (Rowman and Littlefield 2003).

Media, Ethics, and Agency in an Uncertain World

Listening Beyond the Echoes

Nick Couldry is one of the world’s leading analysts of media power and voice, and has been publishing widely for 25 years. This volume, published 20 years after The Place of Media Power, brings together a rich collection of essays from his earliest to his latest writings, some of them hard to access, plus two previously unpublished chapters. The book’s 15 chapters cover a variety of themes from voice to space, from Big Data to democracy, and from art to reality television. Taken together, they give a unique insight into the range of Couldry’s interests and passions. Throughout, Couldry’s commitment to connecting media research to wider debates in philosophy and social theory is clear. A substantial Afterword reflects on the common themes that run throughout his work and this volume, and the particular challenges of grasping media’s contribution to social order in an age of datafication. A preface by leading US media scholar Jonathan Gray sets these essays in context. The result is an exciting and clearly-written text that will interest students and researchers of media, culture and social theory across the world.

Essays of Refraction

Media, Voice, Space and Power

Sociologia dei nuovi media. Teoria sociale e pratiche mediali digitali

James Curran

Professor of Communications James Curran

In this book, media scholars and political scientists develop a broad comparative framework for analysing alternative media in various countries. Topics include independent media centres, gay online networks, feminist film and alternative web discussion forums.

Alternative Media in a Networked World

Contesting Media Power

The media are an inescapable part of our everyday life. Drawing on sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of ritual, Nick Couldry applies the work of the work of theorists to a number of important media arenas.

A Critical Approach

Media Rituals

Media Rituals rethinks our accepted concepts of ritual behaviour for a media-saturated age. It connects ritual directly with questions of power, government, and surveillance and explores the ritual space which the media construct and where their power is legitimated. Drawing on sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of ritual, Couldry applies the work of theorists such as Durkheim, Bourdieu and Bloch to a number of important media arenas: the public media event; reality TV; Webcam sites; talk shows and docu-soaps; media pilgrimages; the construction of celebrity. In a final chapter, he imagines a different world where the media's ritual power is less, because the possibilities of participation in media production are more evenly shared.

Nick Couldry

Books

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