Social media: human life

This article explores the idea that research into media communications and information has recently undergone a normative turn as more and more writers reflect on the ever deeper embedding of our lives in media, and the possible costs that this entails. Possible ways forward for deepening and addressing this normative turn are explored, based on the particular contribution to media and communications research of social theory

What’s at Stake in Algorithmic Accountability

Nick Couldry, Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory at LSE, explores the challenges for social theory and civic debate in addressing the outcomes of automated systems and decision making

Illusions of immediacy: rediscovering Hall's early work on media

In this short article, I analyse Hall’s neglected early work on media and its account of how ideology is reproduced through the everyday workings of media institutions. I trace the importance of that work through later work on the mythical aspects of media institutions (Couldry) and more recent work on the culture of connectivity (Van Dijck) and its appropriation of the social in the form of social media platforms

Cultural studies can we/ should we reinvent it?

This short article returns to an original sense of the term ‘cultural studies’, that is, a subject which needed to be invented to supplement a democratic deficit in established humanities and social science disciplines. It reviews reasons why something like cultural studies needs to be reinvented again today (converging crises in democratic systems and culture, deriving from new social and political ecologies, linked to technology), but also reasons why, right now, this is particularly difficult. Addressing this challenge requires a modesty as to what can be done, but also an urgency opening up a space where the threats to democracy’s future can honestly be faced in a cross-disciplinary dialogue

Universities and the necessary counter-culture against neoliberalism

In various nation-states (including the UK) universities (or institutions of higher education) are being reformed along similar lines – to ensure that their aims and substance are closer to the ‘needs’ of the economy. This development undermines the historic aims of universities as sites where the widest range of people get access to the widest range of knowledge that society and the world needs. The crisis of the university is part therefore of the wider crisis of voice in neoliberal democracies. Moving beyond that crisis requires a counter-culture that defends and rebuilds the values of the university against the force of neoliberal culture. This article argues that in the today’s global crisis of finance and democratic legitimacy what societies need is precisely the open thinking about alternative futures that universities were once empowered to provide. The defence of the university against neoliberal attack is therefore part of the wider defence of democracy.En varios Estados Nación (incluyendo al Reino Unido), las universidades (o instituciones de Enseñanza Superior) están sufriendo reformas similares – que orientan sus objetivos y su esencia hacia las ‘necesidades’ de la economía. Esta transformación soslaya el cometido histórico de la Universidad como espacio en el que un amplio espectro de gentes accede a una amplia gama de conocimiento fundamental para la sociedad y para el mundo. La crisis de la Universidad es por tanto parte de la gran crisis de voz en las democracias neoliberales. Para superar la crisis es preciso desarrollar una contra-cultura que defienda y reconstruya los valores de la universidad y se oponga a la fuerza de la cultura neoliberal. Este artículo argumenta que en la actual crisis financiera y de legitimidad democrática, lo que la sociedad necesita es precisamente pensar de forma abierta sobre los futuros alternativos que las universidades fueron una vez llamadas a ofrecer. La defensa de la Universidad frente al ataque neoliberal es también parte de la defensa de la democracia

Media in modernity: a nice derangement of institutions

This article reviews the contribution of media institutions to modernity and its wider institutional arrangements. It will consider how this relationship has normally been conceived, even mythified, and then, in its second half, review how the institutions that we now call ‘media’ are, potentially, disrupting, even deranging, modernity’s arrangements in profound ways. The article will suggest that, under conditions of increased complexity and radically transformed market competition, the changing set of institutions we call ‘media’ demand a major reinterpretation of how modernity ‘works’ through institutional concentration. The first main section reviews in schematic terms the role which media institutions (the press, radio, television, film, but also infrastructural media such as the telegraph) played in the institutional development of modernity from the late 18th century, stabilising the circulation of information and contributing to the freedom associated with modernity, but in the course of this installing a ‘myth of the mediated centre’. The second section will review how this traditional settlement between media and modernity is now being deranged. This goes beyond the globalization of modernity and the complexification of culture landscapes through media and time-space compression. It is a matter, more fundamentally, of a change in the conditions under which media institutions exist and are able to ‘centralize’ communications flows. Today, communications are becoming centralised less through the production and circulation of elaborate media contents at/from global/national centres throughout the social domain (funded through audience-based advertising or state subsidy) and more through the stimulation to/from everywhere of symbolic interactions within a global information space (the internet, and its related apparatus) funded by the collection and sale of data ‘exhaust’ generated by those interactions. The result, paradoxically, is likely to be an increasing destabilisation of many traditional institutions of modernity, and the normalisation of unfreedom through continuous surveillance, undermining the legitimacy of institutional arrangements on which modernity has conventionally relied

Post-Covid: what is cultural theory useful for?

This short piece explores what cultural theory should learn from the experience of the global pandemic. It argues that the main lesson should not be about how the crisis of the pandemic has been interpreted culturally, but about the deep social and economic inequalities which were foregrounded through the experience of ‘getting by’ in the pandemic, which positioned people in very different ways. So dramatic have been those inequalities, that any inherited notion of culture as something shared need to be definitively abandoned. This had already been anticipated in Ulf Hannerz’s deconstruction of holistic notions of culture three decades ago, but it needs now to be acted on, as we seek to confront honestly the growing inequalities which make the normal order of everyday life possible