9th of April 2025, 16–18, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies Common Room, Fabianinkatu 24A, 3rd floor. Drinks and snacks will be served after the lecture – please sign up here for catering by 7.4.2025!
The space of the world: can human solidarity survive social media and what if it can’t?
Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science
In this lecture, drawing on his recent book for Polity, 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? 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? And how, practically, might we advocate for that space at a time when tech regulation is being weaponized in wider geopolitics?
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 a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is the author or editor of seventeen 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 include The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can’t? (Polity 2024), Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (Penguin/W. H. Allen 2024, with Ulises Mejias), 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/).