Prof. Nick Couldry

In the new world order, data is the new oil. Big Tech companies are grabbing our most basic natural resources – our data – exploiting our labour and connections, and repackaging our information to control our views, track our movements, record our conversations and discriminate against us. The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back is the subject of the extraordinary new work by LSE's Professor Nick Couldry and Professor Ulises A. Mejias'. Nick revealed how history can help us both to understand the emerging future and how to fight back.

Nick Couldry is Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory Emeritus and Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. As a sociologist of media and culture, he approaches media and communications from the perspective of the symbolic power that has been historically concentrated in media institutions. He is interested in how media and communications institutions and infrastructures contribute to various types of order (social, political, cultural, economic, ethical). His work has drawn on, and contributed to, social, spatial, democratic and cultural theory, anthropology, and media and communications ethics. His analysis of media as ‘practice’ has been widely influential. In the past 10 years, his work has increasingly focussed on data questions, and ethics, politics and deep social implications of Big Data and small data practices. He is the author or editor of 17 books and many journal articles and book chapters.

He has recently co-founded the Tierra Comun tri-lingual website to encourage networking with and among Latin American scholars and activists interested in data colonialism.