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Colonized by Data: the costs of connection

This seminar by N.Couldry et U.Ali Mejias will introduce their new book, The Costs of Connection: How Data Colonizes Human Life and Appropriates it for Capitalism.

Event, Research Seminar

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This session is organized in partnership with the Centre Internet et Société (CIS).

This talk will introduce the speakers’ new book, The Costs of Connection: How Data Colonizes Human Life and Appropriates it for Capitalism (Stanford University Press, August 2019). 

Abstract

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 labor, 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. 

Résumés

Nick Couldry 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 co-founder of the website www.tierracomun.net for encouraging dialogue on data colonialism with scholars and activists from Latin America. He jointly led, with Clemencia Rodriguez, the chapter on media and communications in the 22 chapter 2018 report of the International Panel on social Progress: www.ipsp.org. He is the author or editor of fifteen 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 books are The Costs of Connection (with Ulises Ali Mejias, Stanford UP 2019), Media: Why It Matters (Polity 2019), and Media Voice Space and Power: Essays of Refraction (Routledge 2020). 
More info : nickcouldry.org 

Ulises Ali Mejias is 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) and various articles including ‘Disinformation and the Media: The case of Russia and Ukraine’ in Media, Culture and Society (2017, with N. Vokuev), and ‘Liberation Technology and the Arab Spring: From Utopia to Atopia and Beyond’ in Fibreculture (2012). He is co-founder of Tierra Comun (tierracomun.net) and the Non-Aligned Technologies Movement.
More info : ulisesmejias.com 

Practical information

This seminar will be broadcast online. Think about testing your system before the seminar.

Pre-registration required: register