N Couldry
Biographic Data
| ID | 15328 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Couldry |
| GIVEN NAMES | N |
| FAMILY NAME | Couldry |
| SIGNATURE | COULDRY N |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8233-3287 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 104 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1571 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 104 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
The Space Of The World, Data Colonialism, And Social Contract
This is an extended dialogue with Nick Couldry, a leading media scholar at the London School of Economics and one of the most influential critical voices in contemporary communication studies. Over the past two decades, Couldry has developed an increasingly urgent theoretical framework for understanding how digital technologies reshape human social life—and how resistance remains possible. The conversation unfolds around three foundational works …
The Space of the World
This article reflects on the global space of communications and interaction constructed over three decades through a commercialized Internet and platforms whose business model depends on extracting data from users and shaping user behavior to optimize behavior that will generate advertising value. Those conditions have guaranteed a space of human interaction larger, more polarized, and more toxic than is compatible with human solidarity, and incr…
Critical Perspectives on Communicative Ai
Current media coverage surrounding ChatGPT, LaMDA, and Luminous has brought questions about the automation of communication into the mainstream. Artificially intelligent media are no longer merely mediating instances of communication but are themselves becoming communicative participants. This has generated broad public discussion about these systems and others and the challenges they bring to domains such as education, public discourse, and jour…
Human Life as Terra Nullius
Critical platform scholars have long suggested, if indirectly, that social media power is somehow akin to social engineering. This article argues that the parallel is analytically productive, but for reasons that are more complex than has previously been appreciated. By examining Facebook’s foundational technologies, as described in patents that sought to protect the company’s early innovations, we argue that, unlike previous technocratic attempt…
Infantilising education through risk-averse educational technologies of calculability
This paper describes a paradox in education where AI-driven technologies foster risk-averse learning while contributing to heightened global uncertainties. We highlight how the promises of AI promote risk-aversion at the individual level through personalised learning while inducing unpredictable ‘superrisks’ at the societal level, affecting areas like the labour market, environment, societal relations. This paradox exposes gaps in educational pol…
Data Grab
Hermeneutics for an anti-hermeneutic age
This article, after discussing the obstacles to the initial reception of Martín-Barbero’s work on mediation in Europe, analyses its importance to contemporary media research in terms of three factors: mediation, inequality and complexity. Far from being less relevant today, those insights, and Martín-Barbero’s overall insistence on a hermeneutic approach to understanding culture are of huge relevant today in an age when the automation of cultural…
Data as narrative
This guest contribution to the Contentious Data special issue asks: What are the fundamental processes underlying the possibility of data activism? It argues that, if like everything else, social movements are being datafied, this operates on at least four levels: a change in the general conditions under which all social movements operate; data becoming either the specific or general object of activism; and finally, data becoming crucial to pract…
Die mediale Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit
Dieses Buch bietet eine differenzierte Darstellung wie die „digitale Welt“ entstanden ist und wohin die tiefgreifende Mediatisierung uns führt.
The decolonial turn in data and technology research
This article traces the emergence of a ‘decolonial turn’ in critical technology and data studies that analyzes the transformation of society through data extraction for profit. First, we offer a genealogy of concepts over the last decade from different fields related to this decolonial turn, including work that explores the connection between racism and data. Second, we discuss the commonalities and differences between these approaches and our ow…
On Social Media, Solidarity, and the Catastrophe of Climate Change
This short article reflects on the implications of the political challenge of combatting climate change. For this, greater political solidarity will be needed. But what if our current model of social media platforms is generally toxic for solidarity? This article explores that possibility and its implications for the domain and practice of social media
CHAPTER 1 Theorising Media as Practice
CHAPTER 3 Media as Practice
Le colonialisme des données
On affirme souvent que les données numériques sont le nouveau pétrole. Mais contrairement au pétrole, les données ne sont pas une substance que l’on trouve dans la nature. Il faut se les approprier. La collecte et le traitement des données sociales s’effectuent par le biais d’un processus que nous appelons relations de données, qui assure la conversion « naturelle » de la vie quotidienne en un flux de données. Le résultat n’est rien de moins qu’u…
Post-Covid
This short piece explores what cultural theory should learn from the experience of the global pandemic. It argues that the main lesson should not be about how the crisis of the pandemic has been interpreted culturally, but about the deep social and economic inequalities which were foregrounded through the experience of ‘getting by’ in the pandemic, which positioned people in very different ways. So dramatic have been those inequalities, that any …
Theorising Media and Practice
Although practice theory has been a mainstay of social theory for nearly three decades, so far it has had very limited impact on media studies. This book draws on the work of practice theorists such as Wittgenstein, Foucault, Bourdieu, Barth and Schatzki and rethinks the study of media from the perspective of practice theory. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from places such as Zambia, India, Hong Kong, the United States, Britain, Norway and …
Analyzing the Platform Economy – Feudalism, Medievalism and Colonialism as Useful Frameworks
The platform economy challenges existing economic systems, social interactions and participation as well as the very foundation of democracy. As data is replacing labor as the central economic good, economy, society, class structures and democracy might change fundamentally. Or we might experience old wine on new bottles. Karl Marx famously said that history tends to repeat itself, first as comedy, later as tragedy. In this panel we ask, whether …
The Costs of Connection
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 participatio…
Health data and global power inequalities
Today’s global media infrastructures involve not just media, but the continual extraction and circulation of data across digital platforms, with health data being an important data domain. The extraction and use of health data raises particular human rights issues. This paper reviews, fist, the basic risks to individuals from unconstrained collection, use and transfer of their personal health data; second, the implications of the fast-growing hea…
Recovering critique in an age of datafication
This article starts out from the need for critical work on processes of datafication and their consequences for the constitution of social knowledge and the social world. Current social science work on datafication has been greatly shaped by the theoretical approach of Bruno Latour, as reflected in the work of Actor Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies (ANT/STS). The article asks whether this approach, given its philosophical underpi…
Cultural studies Can we / should we reinvent it
This short article returns to an original sense of the term ‘cultural studies’, that is, a subject which needed to be invented to supplement a democratic deficit in established humanities and social science disciplines. It reviews reasons why something like cultural studies needs to be reinvented again today (converging crises in democratic systems and culture, deriving from new social and political ecologies, linked to technology), but also reas…
The Costs of Connection
Journal Article The Costs of Connection: How Data Are Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism Get access Stanford University Press, 2019, 352 pages. https://www.sup.org/books/precart/?id=28816 Nick Couldry, Nick Couldry Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Ulises A Mejias Ulises A Mejias Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 99, Issue 1,…
Datafication
Datafication is not just the making of information, which, in one sense, human beings have been doing since the creation of symbols and writing. Rather, datafication is a contemporary phenomenon which refers to the quantification of human life through digital information, very often for economic value. This process has major social consequences. Disciplines such as political economy, critical data studies, software studies, legal theory, and—more…
Media, Voice, Space and Power
Passing ethnographies
Data Colonialism
We are often told that data are the new oil. But unlike oil, data are not a substance found in nature. It must be appropriated. The capture and processing of social data unfolds through a process we call data relations, which ensures the "natural" conversion of daily life into a data stream. The result is nothing less than a new social order, based on continuous tracking, and offering unprecedented new opportunities for social discrimination and …
Conceptualizing Mediatization
Journal Article Conceptualizing Mediatization: Contexts, Traditions, Arguments Get access Nick Couldry, Nick Couldry 1Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Andreas Hepp Andreas Hepp 2Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany Search for other works by this auth…
Theorising media as practice
This article explores the possibility of a new paradigm of media research that understands media, not as texts or structures of production, but as practice. Drawing on recent moves towards a theory of practice in sociology, this paradigm aims to move beyond old debates about media effects and the relative importance of political economy and audience interpretation, at the same time as moving beyond a narrow concentration on audience practices, to…
Mediatization or mediation? Alternative understandings of the emergent space of digital storytelling
This article reviews the social potential of digital storytelling, and in particular its potential to contribute to the strengthening of democracy. Through answering this question, it seeks to test out the relative strengths and weaknesses of two competing concepts for grasping the wider consequences of media for the social world: the concept of mediatization and the concept of mediation. It is argued that mediatization (developed, for example, b…
The myth of 'us
This article examines critically the claims that digital networks (digital media infrastructures, especially social media platforms) fundamentally change the conditions of politics over the longer term. Without doubt digital networks enable faster political mobilization, accelerated cycles of action, and some new forms of collectivity, but how consequential is this in the longer term when set alongside other longer term consequences of a digitall…
Liveness, "Reality," and the Mediated Habitus from Television to the Mobile Phone
Television's liveness has long been seen as one of its key features. This paper argues that "liveness" is not a textual feature, but a more fundamental category (in Durkheim's sense) that contributes to underlying conceptions of how media are involved in social organization through their provision of privileged access to central social "realities." This ideological view of liveness (cf. Jane Feuer's early work) is then extended in two ways: first…
Reality TV, or The Secret Theater of Neoliberalism
Celebrity culture and public connection
Media and cultural research has an important contribution to make to recent debates about declines in democratic engagement: for example, is celebrity culture a route into democratic engagement for those otherwise disengaged? This article contributes to this debate by reviewing qualitative and quantitative findings from a UK project on `public connection'. Using self-produced diaries (with in-depth multiple interviews) and a nationwide survey, th…
Media meta-capital
Big Data from the bottom up
This short article argues that an adequate response to the implications for governance raised by 'Big Data' requires much more attention to agency and reflexivity than theories of 'algorithmic power' have so far allowed. It develops this through two contrasting examples: the sociological study of social actors used of analytics to meet their own social ends (for example, by community organisations) and the study of actors' attempts to build an ec…
Media as Data Extraction
The communications field must challenge traditional understandings of media in the face of a transformation in the dynamics of capitalism that prioritizes the generation of value from data based on continuous surveillance. New advertising and data-processing developments mean that while the term media may continue to attach to the distribution of narratives, researchers must now conceive it as the convergence of message-circulation technologies w…
Real social analytics
This article argues against the assumption that agency and reflexivity disappear in an age of 'algorithmic power' (Lash 2007). Following the suggestions of Beer (2009), it proposes that, far from disappearing, new forms of agency and reflexivity around the embedding in everyday practice of not only algorithms but also analytics more broadly are emerging, as social actors continue to pursue their social ends but mediated through digital interfaces…
Rethinking the politics of voice
The project of cultural studies has, for some time, lacked a focus. The once critical idea of paying attention to popular culture and its investments, now comfortably institutionalized, has lost it
Theorising Media and Practice
Although practice theory has been a mainstay of social theory for nearly three decades, so far it has had very limited impact on media studies. This book draws on the work of practice theorists such as Wittgenstein, Foucault, Bourdieu, Barth and Schatzki and rethinks the study of media from the perspective of practice theory. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from places such as Zambia, India, Hong Kong, the United States, Britain, Norway and …
Deconstructing datafication’s brave new world
As World Economic Forum’s definition of personal data as ‘the new “oil” – a valuable resource of the 21st century’ shows, large-scale data processing is increasingly considered the defining feature of contemporary economy and society. Commercial and governmental discourse on data frequently argues its benefits, and so legitimates its continuous and large-scale extraction and processing as the starting point for developments in specific industries…
Tracking the Reflexivity of the (Dis)Engaged Citizen
The relationship between governments and citizens in many contemporary democracies is haunted by uncertainty, and sociologists face the task of listening effectively to citizens' own reflections on this uncertain relationship. This article reflects on the qualitative methodology of a recently completed U.K. project that used a combination of diary and multiple interviews/focus groups to track over a fieldwork period of up to a year citizens' refl…
Culture and citizenship
This article argues that, instead of assuming that we know what ‘cultural citizenship’ involves, we should investigate more closely the uncertainties about what constitutes the ‘culture’ (or cultures) of citizenship. The article argues for the distinctive contribution of cultural studies to the problem of democratic engagement, as usually framed within political science. It then reports some preliminary findings from the recently completed ‘Media…
The continuing lure of the mediated centre in times of deep mediatization
Dayan and Katz’s book Media Events was so crucial because it challenged the dominance of quantitative communications research focused on measurable discrete ‘media effects’. But meanwhile new challenges have emerged which we called ‘deep mediatization’ – datafication, deeper fragmentation of the audience, and over the longer-term threats to the underlying economic viability of the large-scale integrated media producers that could put on ‘media ev…
News in the community
This article examines the emergence of new, inter-local spaces of news production and consumption, drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews with community reporters trained by a community reporter organisation based in the north of England. Practices of news production and content generation are focused on people's own communities and they are underpinned by an ethos of production, which is grounded in a critical consumption of news and coll…
Inaugural
This lecture reviews the history of how the status and authority of media institutions over the past century have been entangled with wider claims about social knowledge and the order of societies. It analyses those relations in terms of three successive and now overlapping myths: 'the myth of the mediated centre' which claims that media (traditional mass media institutions) are privileged access points to our centre of social values and social r…
Researching Social Media as if the Social Mattered
The institutions we have come to call 'media' have been involved for over a century in providing an infrastructure for social life and have invested in a quite particular and privileged way of re-presenting the world as 'social.' The dialectic between 'media' and 'social' has become more urgent to understand in an era when media and information infrastructures have expanded, converged, and become embedded more deeply in the texture of everyday li…
Playing for Celebrity
If we are to understand series such as the first U.K. version of Big Brother as events, rather than just as texts or production processes, we need to draw on anthropological theory, for example, Dayan and Katz's theory of media events. This article develops an anthropologically informed argument about the status of Big Brother as event, its ambiguous claims to present social “reality,” and the connection of those claims with its other claim to of…
The view from inside the 'simulacrum‘
The social significance of visits to television and film locations has been little studied. This article concentrates on Granada Studios Tour (GST) - home of the external set of Coronation Street - and uses as its main source interviews with visitors to GST, conducted on site and in visitors' homes, to explore the complex significance of this site. Although sites such as GST have tended to be dismissed because of their ‘fictive’ status, a detaile…
Work, Power and Performance
This article addresses the relationship between the British version of the reality television programme The Apprentice and the shifting working cultures of contemporary neoliberalism. It explores how the programme enacts, through ritualized play, many skills required by the 'flexible' work economy: emotional commitment, entrepreneurial adaptability, a combination of team conformity and personal ambition. In particular, it highlights how newly cal…
The Productive ‘Consumer’ and the Dispersed ‘Citizen’
This article argues for a more nuanced approach to the relationships between the figures of ‘consumer’ and ‘citizen’, normally assumed to exist in separate spaces. Against the idea that each acquires information and feelings of connection in isolation (the ‘plugged-in monad model’), the article argues for an open research agenda into how the spaces of public connection that frame both practices are sustained and the common issues of trust that af…
Speaking about others and speaking personally
This article (Section I) suggests a reformulation of cultural studies' practice in terms of certain general discursive skills rather than particular objects of enquiry. This is offered as the best way of answering the epistemological and ethical doubts that have afflicted all social enquiry in recent decades (especially ethnography) and of reimagining the place of cultural studies in social practice in a way that goes beyond the ‘long dominative …
The view from inside the 'simulacrum‘
The social significance of visits to television and film locations has been little studied. This article concentrates on Granada Studios Tour (GST) - home of the external set of Coronation Street - and uses as its main source interviews with visitors to GST, conducted on site and in visitors' homes, to explore the complex significance of this site. Although sites such as GST have tended to be dismissed because of their ‘fictive’ status, a detaile…
Disrupting the media frame at Greenham Common
Drawing on Martin-Barbero's insistence on analysing the media's complex processes of social `mediation' and Scannell's insistence on grasping the phenomenal complexity of the media frame and how people interact with it, it is argued that an important, relatively neglected, dimension of the disruptive power of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp (1981-) has been its challenge to the terms of the media frame, the `struggle for visibility' it rep…
Inside Culture
The Hidden Injuries of Media Power
The consumption landscape is saturated by media messages and media values, as many pessimistic diagnoses of contemporary culture have emphasized. We lack, however, the tools for understanding the details and the structural forces at work within that landscape, a gap which this article aims to fill by developing a concept of media and the boundaries and hierarchies that help produce the media's legitimacy. ‘Media power’ means here the concentratio…
The Umbrella Man
In a supposedly ‘anti-political age’, the boundaries which define ‘the political’ are central to understanding politics, particularly when their construction is determined by wider processes of cultural exclusion. This article aims to illuminate these issues by examining the ‘political’ and media tactics of one British social activist, known as ‘the Umbrella Man’, who works particularly on campaigns for old age and disability issues. In a society…
Dialogue in an Age of Enclosure
Playing for Celebrity
If we are to understand series such as the first U.K. version of Big Brother as events, rather than just as texts or production processes, we need to draw on anthropological theory, for example, Dayan and Katz's theory of media events. This article develops an anthropologically informed argument about the status of Big Brother as event, its ambiguous claims to present social “reality,” and the connection of those claims with its other claim to of…
Mediation and Alternative Media, or Relocating the Centre of Media and Communication Studies
Alternative media should not be marginal, but central, to the developing agenda of media and communication studies, because they challenge the massive concentration of 'symbolic power' (Bourdieu) in mainstream media institutions and the resulting 'exclusion' of most people 'from the power of naming' (Melucci). Precisely because alternative media organisations, in relative terms, lack symbolic resources, their activities tend to be largely invisib…
Contesting Media Power
Contesting Media Power is the most ambitious international collection to date on the worldwide growth of alternative media that are challenging the power concentration in large media corporations. Media scholars and political scientists develop a broad comparative framework for analyzing alternative media in Australia, Chile, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, Sweden, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Topics include indepe…
Media meta-capital
MediaSpace
The Productive ‘Consumer’ and the Dispersed ‘Citizen’
This article argues for a more nuanced approach to the relationships between the figures of ‘consumer’ and ‘citizen’, normally assumed to exist in separate spaces. Against the idea that each acquires information and feelings of connection in isolation (the ‘plugged-in monad model’), the article argues for an open research agenda into how the spaces of public connection that frame both practices are sustained and the common issues of trust that af…
Theorising media as practice
This article explores the possibility of a new paradigm of media research that understands media, not as texts or structures of production, but as practice. Drawing on recent moves towards a theory of practice in sociology, this paradigm aims to move beyond old debates about media effects and the relative importance of political economy and audience interpretation, at the same time as moving beyond a narrow concentration on audience practices, to…
Liveness, "Reality," and the Mediated Habitus from Television to the Mobile Phone
Television's liveness has long been seen as one of its key features. This paper argues that "liveness" is not a textual feature, but a more fundamental category (in Durkheim's sense) that contributes to underlying conceptions of how media are involved in social organization through their provision of privileged access to central social "realities." This ideological view of liveness (cf. Jane Feuer's early work) is then extended in two ways: first…
Media Rituals
Culture and citizenship
This article argues that, instead of assuming that we know what ‘cultural citizenship’ involves, we should investigate more closely the uncertainties about what constitutes the ‘culture’ (or cultures) of citizenship. The article argues for the distinctive contribution of cultural studies to the problem of democratic engagement, as usually framed within political science. It then reports some preliminary findings from the recently completed ‘Media…
La téléréalité ou le théâtre secret du néolibéralisme
La dimension mythique ou simplement rituelle est présente dans le système économique, et ne peut être occultée puisqu’elle fonde sa plausibilité et sa légitimité. Ce court article cherche à expliciter la relation entre deux facteurs : d’une part, un mouvement pressant (en particulier au Royaume-Uni) vers une économie de plus en plus appuyée sur le « travail émotionnel » des salariés, qui, de plus, méprise le statut du travail ; d’autre part, les …
Public Connection through Media Consumption
This article reviews the ongoing contribution of Personal Influence to our understanding of media' social consequences from the perspective of recent research (the London School of Economics “Public Connection” project, 2003-2006, conducted by the authors and Sonia Livingstone) into the extent to which shared habits of media consumption help sustain, or not, U.K. citizens' orientation to a public world. As well as reviewing specific findings of t…
Connection or Disconnection?
The decades-long debate on media and the public sphere has primarily been normative, rather than empirical, in character. We especially lack empirical research detailing how the mediated public sphere is enacted ( if it is) in everyday life. There has been, we would argue, a significant gap in studying the experiential dimensions of citizenship (what it actually feels like to be a citizen (cf. LeBlanc, 1999)): indeed what are the practices which …
Media Power
Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie und Medien
Die Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie (ANT) ist ein hoch einflussreicher Ansatz innerhalb der Wissenssoziologie, der die soziale Ordnung nicht über eine essenzialistische Idee ‚des Sozialen‘ zu erklären versucht, sondern über die Netzwerke der Verbindungen zwischen menschlichen Handelnden („agents“), Technologien und Objekten. Entitäten (gleich ob menschlich oder nicht) innerhalb dieser Netzwerke erlangen Macht durch die Zahl, Reichweite und Stabilität der…
Soziologie und das Versprechen der Cultural Studies
Celebrity culture and public connection
Media and cultural research has an important contribution to make to recent debates about declines in democratic engagement: for example, is celebrity culture a route into democratic engagement for those otherwise disengaged? This article contributes to this debate by reviewing qualitative and quantitative findings from a UK project on `public connection'. Using self-produced diaries (with in-depth multiple interviews) and a nationwide survey, th…
Tracking the Reflexivity of the (Dis)Engaged Citizen
The relationship between governments and citizens in many contemporary democracies is haunted by uncertainty, and sociologists face the task of listening effectively to citizens' own reflections on this uncertain relationship. This article reflects on the qualitative methodology of a recently completed U.K. project that used a combination of diary and multiple interviews/focus groups to track over a fieldwork period of up to a year citizens' refl…
Sociology (75 works) · Political science (63 works) · Law (43 works) · Media Studies and Communication (43 works) · Media studies (38 works) · Social Media and Politics (38 works) · Computer Science (37 works) · Social science (36 works) · Epistemology (33 works) · Politics (33 works)