From the Myth of the Mediated Centre to the Myth of Big Data: Reflections on Media's Role in Social Order
Thursday 25 February 2021, 15:00CET (2pm UK; 9am EST; 11pm JST)This talk will look back on the author’s theoretical writings on media, first on television, then on social media, and most recently on processes of datafication. The lecture will bring out the common theme that unites all this work, which is social order, and media’s contribution to social order. While this theme was implicit in his earlier work on ritual and myth, Couldry will explain how he has been able to make this theme more explicit in recent work, through drawing on the work of the German sociologist Norbert Elias. This approach can integrate an appreciation of the material aspects of technology and infrastructure, while holding on, as Elias also insisted, to a human and ethical perspective, in considering the consequences of changes in social order for everyday life. Towards the end of the talk Couldry will consider the implications of processes of datafication for the institutions we have, until now, known as media and the hermeneutic perspective on the world which, until now, they have represented. Can this perspective survive the spread of datafication? Or can we plausibly look to media institutions’ narratives for one source of resistance to datafication?
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 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) and Media: Why It Matters (Polity: 2019).
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