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The Space of the World. Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What If It Can't?. Edition No. 1

  • Book

  • 288 Pages
  • October 2024
  • Region: Global
  • John Wiley and Sons Ltd
  • ID: 5948879
Over the past thirty years, humanity has made a huge mistake. We handed over to big tech decisions that have allowed them to build what has become our "space of the world" - the highly artificial space of social media platforms where much of our social life now unfolds. This has proved reckless and has huge social consequences.

The toxic effects on social life, young people’s mental health, and political solidarity are well known, but the key factor underlying all this has been missed: the fact that humanity allowed business to construct our space of the world at all and then exploit it for profit. In the process, we ignored two millennia of political thought about the conditions under which a healthy or even a non-violent politics is possible. We endangered the one resource that is in desperately short supply in the face of catastrophic climate change: solidarity. Is human solidarity possible in a world of continuous digital connection and commercially managed platforms, and what if it isn’t?

In the first book of his trilogy, Humanising the Future, Nick Couldry offers a radical new vision of how to design our digital spaces so that they build, rather than erode, both solidarity and community. This trenchant and vividly written book stresses that we cannot afford not to care for our space of the world. We need to rebuild it together.

Table of Contents

Preface to ‘Humanising the Future’ trilogy

Figures

 

Part One

 

Introduction: What Have We Done?

1 Redesigning the Social World as if by Accident

2 When Political Theory Gets Bypassed

 

Part Two

 

3 The World at My Fingertips?

4 When Trust Starts to Fail

5 Uncivil Societies

 

Part Three

 

6 Can Solidarity Survive?

7 Rebuilding Social Media

 

Acknowledgements

Further Reading Suggestions

Notes

Index

Authors

Nick Couldry University of London, UK.