[Commlist] New book: The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What If It Can't?

New book
The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and 
What If It Can't?
Nick Couldry

https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-space-of-the-world-can-human-solidarity-survive-social-media-and-what-if-it-cant--9781509554720



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.

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Nick Couldry is Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory at 
the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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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
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