Geomedia Speaker Series - Nick Couldry
GEOMEDIA SPEAKER SERIES - THE CORPORATIZATION OF SOCIAL SPACE: HOW BIG TECH TRANSFORMED THE SPACE OF THE WORLD AND WHAT WE SHOULD DO ABOUT IT
NICK COULDRY, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
- Date: Thursday, September 19, 13:15-14:45
- Room: 1B306 (Fryxellsalen)Ìý
The concept of MediaSpace was introduced in 2004 to highlight the complexities and contradictions in media’s relations with space, but on the cusp of a new era. Although Couldry and McCarthy’s original introduction noted software’s emerging role in producing space, no one two decades ago quite foresaw the emergence of social media or the broader platform economy (yet Facebook was launched in February 2004). Looking back, the MediaSpace debate was on balance more about how understanding media always also means understanding space than the reverse: how the production of space is always also about media productions. But today twenty years on, our sense of urgency has shifted. Meanwhile, our definition of ‘media’ has changed profoundly to include digital platforms of all sorts and the continuous extraction of value from them through the production of space.
From this starting-point, Nick Couldry will reflect in this lecture on how Big Tech corporations, particularly social media, have transformed the ‘space of the world’, that is, the sum of all the spaces where social life goes on, and in the process changed drastically humanity’s possibilities for solidarity, civil society and politics, and, more generally, living well. The lecture will serve to introduce Couldry’s about-to-be-published bookÌýThe Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can’t?ÌýÌý
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 since 2017 a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.
Nick Couldry is the author or editor of seventeen books including:
- The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Andreas Hepp, Polity, 2016)
- Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity 2012)
- MediaSpace (Routledge 2004, co-edited with Anna McCarthy)
His latest books include:
- The Space of the World (Polity, forthcoming October 2024)
- Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (Penguin/W. H. Allen 2024, with Ulises Mejias)
- Media: Why It Matters (Polity: 2019)
- Media, Voice, Space and Power: Essays of Refraction (Routledge 2021).
Nick is also the co-founder of the Tierra Común network of scholars and activists