Are we colonised by data? – Nick Couldry on media rituals and data colonialism

Nick Couldry, professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), visited us in Berlin for his lecture "Colonised by data". HIIG researcher Thomas Christian Bächle met with Couldry – who once was his professor at Goldsmiths College in London eleven years ago – for a talk on the digital society. In this episode, we learn about Couldry's very own media rituals – celebrity spotting and falling asleep to the radio news – as well as how a media professor is dealing with knowing what kind of personal data WhatsApp is collecting. Also: What exactly is data colonialism? How is it different from concepts such as surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2018) or data capitalism?