Nick Couldry -THE CORPORATIZATION OF SOCIAL SPACE

The concept of MediaSpace was introduced in 2004 to highlight the complexities and contradictions in media’s relations with space, but on the cusp of a new era. Although Couldry and McCarthy’s original introduction noted software’s emerging role in producing space, no one two decades ago quite foresaw the emergence of social media or the broader platform economy (yet Facebook was launched in February 2004). Looking back, the MediaSpace debate was on balance more about how understanding media always also means understanding space than the reverse: how the production of space is always also about media productions. But today twenty years on, our sense of urgency has shifted. Meanwhile, our definition of ‘media’ has changed profoundly to include digital platforms of all sorts and the continuous extraction of value from them through the production of space.

From this starting-point, Nick Couldry will reflect in this lecture on how Big Tech corporations, particularly social media, have transformed the ‘space of the world’, that is, the sum of all the spaces where social life goes on, and in the process changed drastically humanity’s possibilities for solidarity, civil society and politics, and, more generally, living well. The lecture will serve to introduce Couldry’s about-to-be-published book The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can’t?