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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 from 2017 has been a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

He is the co-founder with Paola Ricaurte and Ulises Mejias of the website www.tierracomun.net which supports dialogue with/among Latin American scholars and activists about data colonialism. He jointly led, with Clemencia Rodriguez, the chapter on media and communications in the 22 chapter 2018 report of the International Panel on Social Progress: www.ipsp.org. 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 (with Ulises Mejias, Stanford UP, 2019), Media: Why It Matters (Polity, 2019) and Media, Voice, Space and Power (Routledge, 2020).


News

Emerging Digital Issues from the Global South Working Group
Oct 1, 2019

Think South: Reimagining the Internet

Raising voices of our global community through poetry, indigenous art, and short pieces


Community

Tech Won't Save Us

The Threat of Data Colonialism

Ulises Mejías and Nick Couldry propose data colonialism as a paradigm for understanding Big Tech's data practices.

Oct 24, 2024
The London School of Economics and Political Science

Today’s colonial “data grab” is deepening global inequalities

Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias argue that we are seeing data grabs that deepend global inequalities.

May 1, 2024
Social Movement Studies

Data as narrative: contesting the right to the word

Nick Couldry investigates the fundamental processes that underly data activism.

Mar 14, 2024
Jacobin

The US Government Should Be Bold in Regulating AI and Data Collection

Russell Newman, Nick Couldry, Velislava Hillman, Mitzi László and Gregory Narr discuss the comments to the US Federal Trade Commission's Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on…

Sep 18, 2023
Medium

4 Ways the New EU Digital Acts Fall Short and How to Remedy It

BKC associates delve into the shortcomings of EU’s legislation addressing digital giants. “The gaps we see in these new regulations are less matters of language than a…

Jul 5, 2022
Information, Communication & Society

The decolonial turn in data and technology research: what is at stake and where is it heading?

Nick Couldry and Ulises Ali Mejias trace a trend in research that focuses on how society is transformed by data extraction for profit.

Nov 9, 2021
Media@LSE

It’s time to stop trusting Facebook to engineer our social world

Nick Couldry writes that tighter regulations are needed to ensure that social media companies act in the public interest.

Oct 12, 2021
The Washington Post

The lawsuits against Facebook don’t go far enough

The site’s business model is the problem, not just which apps it owns, argue Dipayan Ghosh and Nick Couldry

Dec 11, 2020
FT

Big Tech’s latest moves raise health privacy fears

Nick Couldry and colleague argue data about intimate details of our lives should not be exploited by corporations

Dec 6, 2020
Slate

Big Tech Needs an Entirely New Business Model

Nick Couldry and Dipayan Ghosh say a “digital realignment” is necessary

Oct 30, 2020

Events

May 22, 2023 @ 11:00 AM

A Convivial Social Media?

May 22, join us for a discussion and workshop using the lens of conviviality to ask how we create healthier and more sustainable engagement with social media.

Sep 19, 2019 @ 12:00 PM

Colonized by Data: The Costs of Connection with Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias

Book Talk

VIDEO & PODCAST: 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…

Event
Oct 18, 2017 @ 4:00 PM

Deep Mediatization: Social Order in the Age of Datafication

Social order - what counts as order in the social world - is changing in the digital era, the era of deep mediatization. How can social theory help us understand this shift, and…