This new blog for LSE's European Politics and Policy blog is my take on the current debate on social media age-based bans: basically, they will fail because they are not radical enough! https://lnkd.in/e9yNVKHg
Nick Couldry
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On a weekend of atrocious news, this vision of better public spaces, closer to communities, is a much needed positive (thanks to New Public): https://open.substack.com/pub/newpublic/p/we-need-a-revolution-in-social-media?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Interesting blog reacting to my recent LSE lecture on the future of social media : https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2025/10/28/the-space-of-our-world-how-social-media-broke-solidarity-and-how-we-might-mend-it/
The space of our world: how social media broke solidarity and how we might mend it - Media@LSE
Kirti Dubey writes about Professor Nick Couldry’s public lecture at LSE where he detailed the arguments in his recent book, The Space of the World,
for those who missed the live version of my recent talk and debate at LSE with Baroness Beeban Kidron on the future of social media, here is the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0FvsczDLQk . For me, was an amazing evening and made the huge effort of writing the book worthwhile!
Can human solidarity survive social media and what if it can’t? | LSE Event
Very excited to announce that my paper 'Human Life as Terra Nullius' with @joao_magalhaes on the colonial implications of Facebook's early patents is now out in Philosophy & Technology: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-025-00971-9. Has been a privilege to work with Joao on this over the past 5 years and develop the concept of 'socially blind engineering'
Human Life as Terra Nullius: Socially Blind Engineering in Facebook’s Foundational Technologies - Philosophy & Technology
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 attempts to reconstruct society, the platform’s equally consequential rendering of social reality into a legible and controllable social graph involved no substantive vision of the social world at all. Rather, the company engaged in a form of socially blind engineering, misrecognizing the actual social world as a terra nullius, as if it had no inhabitants who needed to be taken into account, and so was a domain from which profit could be extracted with relative impunity. In so doing, we develop a conceptual vocabulary to understand the widely-criticised recklessness that, notwithstanding some more charitable recent readings, marked the early Facebook – and that might still influence the tech sector as a whole.
on 2nd October I'll give an LSE lecture on the future of social media based on my recent book The Space of the World https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-space-of-the-world-can-human-solidarity-survive-social-media-and-what-if-it-cant--9781509554720. I am delighted that Baroness Beeban Kidron will respond, and my dear colleague Myria Georgiou will be chairing. Do come if you are near London: there'll be a live stream too! https://www.lse.ac.uk/events/the-space-of-the-world-can-human-solidarity-survive-social-media
New article on 'Infantilising Education' through AI by myself and Velislava Hillman OUT TODAY with the British Journal of Sociology of Education: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01425692.2025.2519485
If you are in the UK and fancy a day or two in the countryside, I will be speaking on #datacolonialism at the ALSO festival at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, on Saturday July 12 morning. Details here: https://www.also-festival.com/entities/also-festival/content/also-ideas
ALSO | Talks
ALSO sprung from the loins of Salon London, one of the first organisations on the planet that put ideas from authors, academics, and experts together with audiences in stylish evening Salons and was described by GQ as ‘one of the top things to do in the world’. It also means we have over two decades’ experience of taking ideas and letting them run wild so in 2014, having programmed extensively for all the most creative festivals in the UK (putting the clever content in to Latitude, Wilderness, Standon Calling, Soho House, Festival No 6, Blue Dot and Lost Village) we knew exactly how to curate the UK’s first music and ideas festival.
A REMINDER OF TODAY'S debate on BIG TECH IS BROKEN: WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT NOW? with myself, @rwg and@eilah_tan. 6PM UK time, 7pm CET, 1pm ET, 10am PT. do join us!! Here's how you register https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/big-tech-is-broken-what-can-we-do-about-it-now-tickets-1268506811019?aff=oddtdtcreator
#fediverse #mastodon
#fediverse #mastodon
Tuesday 27 May 6pm BST (5PM GMT, 12 MIDDAY ET) I host an LSE online debate on BIG TECH IS BROKEN: WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT NOW? with two leading FEDIVERSE experts: Rob Gehl York U Toronto @rwg, author of MOVE SLOWLY AND BUILD BRIDGES (OUP 2025) and Nathalie Van Raemdonck VUB @eilah_tan Please join us! Registration link here: https://lse.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_fzGeYGHGR56Ln3jgn8t01Q#/registration
