A compelling argument that the extractive practices of today's tech giants are the continuation of colonialism--and a crucial guide to collective resistance. &nbsp; Large technology companies like Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet have unprecedented access to our daily lives, collecting information when we check our email, count our steps, shop online, and commute to and from work. Current events are concerning--both the changing owners (and names) of billion-dollar tech companies and regulatory concerns about artificial intelligence underscore the sweeping nature of Big Tech's surveillance and the influence such companies hold over the people who use their apps and platforms. &nbsp; As trusted tech experts Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry show in this eye-opening and convincing book, this vast accumulation of data is not the accidental stockpile of a fast-growing industry. Just as nations stole territories for ill-gotten minerals and crops, wealth, and dominance, tech companies steal personal data important to our lives. It's only within the framework of colonialism, Mejias and Couldry argue, that we can comprehend the full scope of this heist. &nbsp; Like the land grabs of the past, today's data grab converts our data into raw material for the generation of corporate profit against our own interests. Like historical colonialism, today's tech corporations have engineered an extractive form of doing business that builds a new social and economic order, leads to job precarity, and degrades the environment. These methods deepen global inequality, consolidating corporate wealth in the Global North and engineering discriminatory algorithms. Promising convenience, connection, and scientific progress, tech companies enrich themselves by encouraging us to relinquish details about our personal interactions, our taste in movies or music, and even our health and medical records. Do we have any other choice? &nbsp; Data Grab affirms that we do. To defy this new form of colonialism we will need to learn from previous forms of resistance and work together to imagine entirely new ones. Mejias and Couldry share the stories of voters, workers, activists, and marginalized communities who have successfully opposed unscrupulous tech practices. An incisive discussion of the digital media that's transformed our world, Data Grab is a must-read for anyone concerned about privacy, self-determination, and justice in the internet age.

Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back

Politics & Social Sciences

Couldry, Nick

Mejias, Ulises A.

Social Sciences

University of Chicago Press

Media, Voice, Space and Power: Essays of Refraction

Nick Couldry is one of the world’s leading analysts of media power and voice, and has been publishing widely for 25 years. This volume, published 20 years after The Place of Media Power, brings together a rich collection of essays from his earliest to his latest writings, some of them hard to access, plus two previously unpublished chapters. The book’s 15 chapters cover a variety of themes from voice to space, from Big Data to democracy, and from art to reality television. Taken together, they give a unique insight into the range of Couldry’s interests and passions. Throughout, Couldry’s commitment to connecting media research to wider debates in philosophy and social theory is clear. A substantial Afterword reflects on the common themes that run throughout his work and this volume, and the particular challenges of grasping media’s contribution to social order in an age of datafication. A preface by leading US media scholar Jonathan Gray sets these essays in context. The result is an exciting and clearly-written text that will interest students and researchers of media, culture and social theory across the world.

Reference

Routledge

This fascinating study focuses on an area neglected in previous studies of the media: the meetings between ordinary people and the media. Couldry explores what happens when people who normally consume the media witness media processes in action, or even become the object of media attention themselves.

The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age (Comedia)

Humor & Entertainment

Radio

Media Rituals rethinks our accepted concepts of ritual behaviour for a media-saturated age. It connects ritual directly with questions of power, government, and surveillance and explores the ritual space which the media construct and where their power is legitimated. Drawing on sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of ritual, Couldry applies the work of theorists such as Durkheim, Bourdieu and Bloch to a number of important media arenas: the public media event; reality TV; Webcam sites; talk shows and docu-soaps; media pilgrimages; the construction of celebrity. In a final chapter, he imagines a different world where the media's ritual power is less, because the possibilities of participation in media production are more evenly shared.

Media Rituals: A Critical Approach

Media Rituals

MediaSpace: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age (Comedia)

Media Space explores the importance of ideas of space and place to understanding the ways in which we experience the media in our everyday lives. Essays from leading international scholars address the kinds of space created by media and the effects that spacial arrangements have on media forms. Case studies focus on a wide variety of subjects and locales, from in-flight entertainment to mobile media such as personal stereos and mobile phones, and from the electronic spaces of the Internet to the shopping mall.

McCarthy, Anna

History

Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice

Media are fundamental to our sense of living in a social world. Since the beginning of modernity, media have transformed the scale on which we act as social beings. And now in the era of digital media, media themselves are being transformed as platforms, content, and producers multiply. Yet the implications of social theory for understanding media and of media for rethinking social theory have been neglected; never before has it been more important to understand those implications. This book takes on this challenge. Drawing on Couldry's fifteen years of work on media and social theory, this book explores how questions of power and ritual, capital and social order, and the conduct of political struggle, professional competition, and everyday life, are all transformed by today's complex combinations of traditional and 'new' media. In the concluding chapters Couldry develops a framework for global comparative research into media and for thinking collectively about the ethics and justice of our lives with media. The result is a book that is both a major intervention in the field and required reading for all students of media and sociology.

Polity

Drawing on Couldry’s fifteen years of work on media and social theory, this book explores how questions of power and ritual, capital and social order, and the conduct of political struggle, professional competition, and everyday life, are all transformed by today’s complex combinations of traditional and ‘new’ media.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Couldry, Nick. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Couldry, Nick

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Couldry, Nick. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back

Media, Voice, Space and Power: Essays of Refraction

Media, Voice, Space and Power: Essays of Refraction

The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age (Comedia)

The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age (Comedia)

Media Rituals: A Critical Approach

Media Rituals

MediaSpace: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age (Comedia)

Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice

Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice