RMeS Workshop: Professor Nick Couldry (London School of Economics and Political Science)
The Space of the World: Digital platforms and the prospects for human solidarity in the 21st century
Nick Couldry (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Date: 10 May 2023
Time: Afternoon (exact time tbc). Provisional programme: Lecture 12.00 – 13.30. Workshop 15.00 – 17.30
Venue: University of Groningen (exact venue tba)
Credits: 1 EC
For: PhD Candidates and RMa students in Media Studies, who are members of a Dutch Graduate Research School (onderzoekschool).
Register for the workshop here. Prior to the workshop, Nick Couldry will give a public lecture which workshop participants also attend.
For more information about the Public Lecture, see this link.
THE WORKSHOP IS FULLY BOOKED, please send an e-mail to rmes@rug.nl with your name, university and research school. We will put you on our waiting list.
In this seminar, Nick Couldry will reflect on the global space of social communications and interaction that has been constructed over the past three decades through a commercialized internet and the emergence of digital platforms whose business model depends on the extraction of data from their users and the shaping of user behaviour in order to optimize user behaviour that will generate advertising value. What if those conditions – valid perhaps in their own commercial terms – have guaranteed a space of human interaction that is larger, more polarized, more intense, and more toxic than is compatible with human solidarity? This would be a major problem for humanity that social theory might play some role in deconstructing and potentially even solving, by formulating alternatives. So how might we imagine a different space of the world that would be less likely to be toxic, and more likely to generate the solidarity and effective cooperation that humanity needs if it is to have any chance of addressing its huge, shared challenges?
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 in since 2017 also a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. 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: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating Life for Capitalism (with Ulises Mejias: Stanford UP, 2019), Media: Why It Matters (Polity: 2019) and 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 (https://www.tierracomun.net/ ) and of the European Media Salon (https://www.european-media-salon.org/events ).