My latest project has been on data colonialism in the book The Costs of Connection co-written with Ulises Mejias. In a 2018 paper, we discussed some of the topics of the book, in particular the relation between Big Data and the contemporary subject and in this more recent paper we have reviewed the debates about our work and its connections with racial capitalism. Between 2021 and 2022 I worked with Louise Hurel to extend the data colonialism framework to digital personal assistants in this article.
Between 2015 and 2018, I was the Coordinating Lead Author of the chapter on Media and Communications in the proposed report by the International Panel on Social Progress. I encourage you to read the chapter, also available in Spanish. To find out more on media as a key dimension of global inequality, please see a recent article published by The Conversation. To access an article on the topic in Spanish, please see La Jornada de Oriente.
A project that anticipated my work on data colonialism was The Price of Connection. It investigated the emerging contradiction between the end and means of internet development, and how it is addressed in public debate, with a view to identifying potential resolutions that might genuinely enhance life over the longer-term. I have co-presented on this topic for the University of Sydney (Department of Media and Communications) and Sydney Ideas: the link to the podcast can be accessed here. This link to a reflection piece published by The Conversation Australia may also be of further interest.
In 2016 I completed a book with Andreas Hepp on The Mediated Construction of Reality (Polity 2016) which revisits Berger and Luckmann’s project that tracked ‘the social construction of reality’, but for the age of digital media. The book also laid the ground work for my later work on data colonialism as a form of social order. More information can be accessed here.
