In this talk, Nick Couldry will draw out some implications from his last two co-authored books: The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism, co-authored with Ulises Mejias (Stanford University Press, 2019) and The Mediated Construction of Reality co-authored with Andreas Hepp (Polity, 2016). What sort of social world is being created in an age of what he and Ulises Mejias have called ‘data colonialism’? What does it mean to say that contemporary capitalism is marked not just by labor relations but also data relations? What is happening to social space and social order in an era of digital platforms? What are the implications of data collection for the very basis of the self and freedom?
