Are we colonised by data?
Nick Couldry has recently coined the term 'data colonialism' in order to highlight continuities from colonialism’s historic appropriation of resources to today's datafication of everyday life. He 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?