A compelling argument that the extractive practices of today’s tech giants are the continuation of colonialism—and a crucial guide to collective resistance.Large technology companies like Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet have unprecedented access to our daily lives, collecting information when we check our email, count our steps, shop online, and commute to and from work. Current events are concerning—both the changing owners (and names) of billion-dollar tech companies ...

Just about any social need is now met with an opportunity to "connect" through digital means. But this convenience is not free—it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate profit. The Costs of Connection uncovers this process, this "data colonialism," and its designs for controlling our lives—our ways of knowing; our means of production; our political participation.Colonialism might seem li...

Over the past thirty years, humanity has made a huge mistake. We handed over to big tech decisions that have allowed them to build what has become our "space of the world" – the highly artificial space of social media platforms where much of our social life now unfolds. This has proved reckless and has huge social consequences.The toxic effects on social life, young people’s mental health, and political solidarity are well known, but the key factor underlying all this has been miss...

Social theory needs to be completely rethought in a world of digital media and social media platforms driven by data processes. Fifty years after Berger and Luckmann published their classic text The Social Construction of Reality, two leading sociologists of media, Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, revisit the question of how social theory can understand the processes through which an everyday world is constructed in and through media.Drawing on Schütz, Elias and many other s...

From TV bulletins to social media newsfeeds, the media plays a massive role in shaping the world as we see it. In fact, different media have helped make possible our world of independent nations, binding together disparate communities through shared cultural touchstones, such as the press and national broadcasters. With the transfer of people’s lives to the online world, the media has become crucial to almost every aspect of how human beings live. A new social order is being built through ...

Nick Couldry is one of the world’s leading analysts of media power and voice, and has been publishing widely for 25 years. This volume, published 20 years after The Place of Media Power, brings together a rich collection of essays from his earliest to his latest writings, some of them hard to access, plus two previously unpublished chapters.The book’s 15 chapters cover a variety of themes from voice to space, from Big Data to democracy, and from art to reality television. ...

In this book Nick Couldry, media and cultural theorist from the London School of Economics, asks what are the priorities for media and cultural research today - at a time of the intensified mediation of all fields of social life, threats to democratic legitimacy, and serious instability on the global political stage. The book calls for a "decentered" media research that rejects easy assumptions about media's role in holding societies together and instead looks more critically at the differ...

Media are fundamental to our sense of living in a social world. Since the beginning of modernity, media have transformed the scale on which we act as social beings. And now in the era of digital media, media themselves are being transformed as platforms, content, and producers multiply.Yet the implications of social theory for understanding media and of media for rethinking social theory have been neglected; never before has it been more important to understand those implications. ...

One of the best books I have read in years about what it means to engage neoliberalism through a critical framework that highlights those narratives and stories that affirm both our humanity and our longing for justice. It should be read by everyone concerned with what it might mean to not only dream about democracy but to engage it as a lived experience and political possibility.- Henry Giroux, McMaster University"An important and original book tha...

"This volume assembles an estimable range of critical analyses of one of the most important mediated artifacts of the modern world—the media event. The authors challenge the construct, extend its usefulness, expand its theoretical basis and application, and examine media events in a far larger and richer context than ever before. Students of global media today are well served by this superb collection of essays."David Morgan, Duke University, USA"A welcome and wort...

Media Space explores the importance of ideas of space and place to understanding the ways in which we experience the media in our everyday lives. Essays from leading international scholars address the kinds of space created by media and the effects that spacial arrangements have on media forms. Case studies focus on a wide variety of subjects and locales, from in-flight entertainment to mobile media such as personal stereos and mobile phones, and from the electronic spaces of the ...

Media Rituals rethinks our accepted concepts of ritual behaviour for a media-saturated age. It connects ritual directly with questions of power, government, and surveillance and explores the ritual space which the media construct and where their power is legitimated.Drawing on sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of ritual, Couldry applies the work of theorists such as Durkheim, Bourdieu and Bloch to a number of important media arenas: the public media e...