Dr. Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science and Dr. Ulises Mejia, SUNY Oswego
Abstract
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). 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. 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.
About the speaker
Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is a professor of media, communications and social theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and in 2018-2019 was a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and society and a visiting professor at MIT. He is the author or editor of fourteen books, including Media: Why It Matters (Polity: October 2019).
Ulises Ali Mejías is an 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 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, as well as the principal investigator in the Algorithm Observatory project.