Digital Traces in Context| Tracing Capitalism’s Turn to Data: Or, Contextualizing Daily Life’s New Data “Context” — Commentary

Authors

  • Nick Couldry London School of Economics

Keywords:

capitalism, datafication, context, epistemology, agency, ontology

Abstract

This short response to the articles in this Special Section foregrounds the wider context of data traces in the development of capitalism. After analyzing the issue’s articles into three categories (dealing with epistemology, agency, and social consequences), the response argues that the biggest context of all to datafication is the current transformation of capitalism under which the production of value is focused on the extraction of value from data. What drives this? What implications does this have for the social domain and the micro-contexts of our practices with data? These are the larger issues toward which the articles in this Special Section all point.

Author Biography

Nick Couldry, London School of Economics

PROFESSOR OF MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS Nick joined the Department in September 2006 from the London School of Economics, where he had been teaching since 2001, after undertaking his MA, PhD and first teaching post at Goldsmiths. He is a participant in the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre and is the author or editor of nine books including The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age (Routledge 2000), Inside Culture (Sage 2000), Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (Routledge, 2003), Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World (Rowman and Littlefield 2003, coedited with James Curran) and most recently Media Events in a Global Age (Routledge 2009, co-edited with Andreas Hepp and Friedrich Krotz). His forthcoming book is Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism (Sage June 2010).

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Published

2018-01-26

Issue

Vol. 12 (2018)

Section

Special Sections

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