LAUNCH OF NEW BOOK: Data Grab [Launched February 8th!]

**NEW** CONTRIBUTOR to online course on "Redes sociales, notícias falsas y crisis democrática” by Mijente

**NEW** Talk on “The Space of the World: Digital Platforms and the Prospects for Human Solidarity in the 21st Century” at Instituto de Estudos Avançados da USP.

Website Tierra Común: intervenciones para descolonizar los datos / interventions for data decolonization.

As a sociologist my main interests are media and communications, culture and power, and social theory. Most of all, I am interested in the consequences for everyday reality of symbolic power’s concentration in particular institutions. This might sound abstract, but it is not!

Throughout my career I have tried to confront a basic paradox: that information and communication technologies, because they present us with a ‘reality’ every day, can easily come to seem like a second nature. As a result, what should always be contestable can end up seeming beyond challenge, a structure of power that is too ‘hard’ to move or break through. Such structure, though written in the ‘soft’ language of symbols, is hard enough to break lives.

Initially, my work was focussed on the power of traditional ‘media’ (particular television and the press) to define political and social reality. More recently, I have become interested in how a range of new digital institutions associated with ‘media’ have taken over that power. Today, the work of constructing reality is done just as importantly through algorithms and data processes that work to measure our activities on online platforms or while using ‘connected’ objects (the ‘internet of things’).

I want to ask: what can social theory contribute to understanding these processes and their transformative effects on society and people’s lives? Can social theory uncover how, when we seem to be most ‘ourselves’, most ‘together’ with others, we may, at the same time, be most thoroughly enfolded in the deep workings of power? That has surely never been more true than in the age of Big Data.

My latest project on these concerns has developed the framework of data colonialism, developed jointly with Ulises Mejias: our first book was The Costs of Connection (2019) and in February we launch a new book aimed at a broad audience: Data Grab (published by W. H. Allen/Penguin with a US edition published by Chicago University Press and German edition published by Fischer).

Between 2015 and 2018, I was also the Coordinating Lead Author of the chapter on Media and Communications in the report of the International Panel on Social Progress. I encourage you to read the chapter, also available in Spanish. Further information on recent projects can be found on the Research Page. For access to videos, podcasts and other media, please follow this link.

These are strange and difficult times. For now, universities are still institutions that can open new horizons of possibility, enabling people to seize their own opportunities for action and imagination. This ‘liberal’ vision of the university is today under threat not least from the extreme instrumentalism that will surely follow in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Academics can play a role in holding on to that older vision and building a counter-culture that sustains it. This new website Tierra Común that links up Latin America scholars and activists interested in resisting data colonialism is a contribution to that: please take a look!

And if you are interested in any of the material on my site, please do get in touch!