Future Networks Talks: Nick Couldry

As part of the Future Networks event, drawing on his 2024 book for Polity, Nick Couldry will deliver keynote address 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 – whatever their commercial justification – have guaranteed a space of human interaction that is larger, more polarized, more intense, and more toxic than is compatible with human solidarity, and as we have seen recently, increasingly complicit with toxic forms of political power? Then we have little choice but to build a different space of the world, 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? Having stated the challenge, the talk will review the challenges: for federated social media, for thinking about the role of offline communities in providing good contexts for rebuilding the online world, and for society that must start to challenge directly the commercial and political forces that are determined to exploit the social toxicity in which it forces citizens and would-be citizens to live.

Bio

Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory Emeritus and Professorial Research Fellow 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/ ).

Event

Future Networks is a two-day conference happening at York University in Toronto, Canada. The aim of the event is to provide tools to challenge present-day constellations of networked power and demonstrate how new, alternative digital networks can shape the future. The event is organized by Robert W. Gehl (York University) and Tero Karppi (University of Toronto Mississauga). https://future-networks.ca/index.html

Time and Location

October 31, 2025, 3:30-4:30pm

280N York Lanes, York University

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