The Costs of Connection: how data is colonizing human life and appropriates it for capitalism

Nick Couldry and Ulises will idiscuss their new book, The Costs of Connection: How Data Colonizes Human Life and Appropriates it for Capitalism.

Couldry and Mejias argue that the role of data in society needs to be grasped as not only

Houghton Street City of London Westminster United Kingdom
Start: Jul 19 2022 00:00
Finish: Dec 01 2024 00:00
Time zone: Europe/London

By: evdb

Jan 29 2021
20
3017 Views

Nick Couldry and Ulises will idiscuss their new book, The Costs of Connection: How Data Colonizes Human Life and Appropriates it for Capitalism.

Couldry and Mejias argue that the role of data in society needs to be grasped as not only a development of capitalism, but as the start of a new phase in human history that rivals in importance the emergence of historic colonialism. This new "data colonialism" is based not on the extraction of natural resources or labour, but on the appropriation of human life through data, paving the way for a further stage of capitalism. Today’s transformations of social life through data must therefore be grasped within the long historical arc of dispossession as both a new colonialism and an extension of capitalism. Resistance requires challenging in their new material guises forms of coloniality that decolonial thinking has foregrounded for centuries. The struggle will be both broader and longer than many analyses of algorithmic power suppose, but for that reason critical responses are all the more urgent. New forms of solidarity are needed that help build connection on different terms from those currently on offer.

Meet our speakers and chair

Nick Couldry (@couldrynick) is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and from 2017 has been a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is the author or editor of fourteen books including The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Andreas Hepp, Polity, 2016), Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity 2012) and Why Voice Matters (Sage 2010). His latest book is entitled The Costs of Connection and Media: Why It Matters (Polity: October 2019).

Ulises Ali Mejias (@UlisesAliMejias) is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and director of the Institute for Global Engagement at the State University of New York, College at Oswego. He is a media scholar whose work encompasses critical internet studies, network theory and science, philosophy and sociology of technology, and political economy of digital media. He is the author of Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

You can order the book, The Costs of Connection and Media: Why It Matters (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney.

More about this event

The Department of Media and Communications (@MediaLSE) is a world-leading centre for education and research in communication and media studies at the heart of LSE’s academic community in central London. The Department is ranked #1 in the UK and #3 globally in the field of media and communications (2020 QS World University Rankings).

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEMediaThe Costs of Connection: how data is colonizing human life and appropriates it for capitalism