Nick Couldry is Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. As a sociologist of media and culture, he approaches media and communications from the perspective of the symbolic power that has been historically concentrated in media institutions. He is interested in how media and communications institutions and infrastructures contribute to various types of order (social, political, cultural, economic, ethical). His work has drawn on, and contributed to, social, spatial, democratic and cultural theory, anthropology, and media and communications ethics. His analysis of media as ‘practice’ has been widely influential. In the past 7 years, his work has increasingly focussed on data questions, and ethics, politics and deep social implications of Big Data and small data practices. He is the author or editor of 15 books and many journal articles and book chapters.
Nick, did you always intend to go into academia? If not, what made you pursue a career in this field?
Well from an early age I wanted to do something like teaching or academic work, as this was my passion, but I was the first person from my family to go to university, so I had no idea how this was going to happen. As a result, then I finished my undergraduate degree (which was in classical languages literature and modern philosophy), I wanted to go on studying, but didn’t know what or how. In the end I followed my father and trained as a lawyer, but with many misgivings. It was only when in my 30s I decided to abandon my career as a lawyer and try music, that I also decided to start a Masters degree and, through a chance connection, chose a new MA in Media and Communications that was starting that year at Goldsmiths, University of London. But after a few months, I realised that I had found the subject that would engage me for the rest of my life.
What made you interested in media and communications and specifically the area that you research?
I knew nothing about media before I started my MA – my previous interests where in literature, philosophy and very broadly social sciences, including anthropology. But I was inspired by teachers like James Curran, David Morley and Valerie Walkerdine. My interest was not such media, as the possibility that deep transformations were under way in the organization of social life through media. I was very unclear at first what my research specialism would be, except I knew it would be something to do with space and society. Gradually I became interested in why it is we have belief, or even trust, in media institutions, when so much important power – the power to tell the stories of what happens in the world – are rather arbitrarily concentrated there, and not distributed amongst people more generally. From there my interest in questions of media power and the ritual dimensions of media emerged, and over time, the idea that media operate as a contested “centre” of social life that is important for its possibilities of order.
What advice they would you give students who are thinking of pursuing a PhD or career in academia?
The commitment of writing and teaching is a huge one. It is only worth making if you have the strong sense that this is what you must do with your life. But, as I said, I got my first career choice wrong, and it took me time to realise what I really wanted to do. I think that has made me more appreciative of the huge privilege that it is to be able to write and think for one’s living, and the huge struggle that it involves for many of us to achieve that possibility. So if this life is for you, you probably already have a sense of it, and the size of the challenge: if so, come to talk to one of us in the Department about how you can achieve your dream.
What was the main issue of the day in terms of media and communications when you were a student? How has it developed?
When I was a BA student, the main issue was financial crisis, and the beginnings of the Thatcherist neoliberal experiment in the UK and US. By the time of my MA in the 1990s, attention had shifted to environmental protest, and a sense of profound change in media with reality TV and the increasingly normalization of online access. What I could never have anticipated was the sheer scale today of corporations' ambitions to manage social life: that remained just a limited dream until the early years of this century, and only in the past 15 years has a very different relation between media, information and society emerged with profound implications for freedom and power.
What do you think is the most important contemporary issue in the field of media and communications, both for soon-to-be graduate students and for professionals in the field?
The most important issue are the implications for social order of the organization of everyday life around digital platforms and infrastructures, and the resulting role that artificial intelligence, machine learning and automated decision-making are increasingly playing in manging human beings. There are many deep commercial forces and organizational needs that are driving these changes. The core question is whether those changes are actually compatible with the values by which people think they live, for example values linked to democracy, fairness and freedom. This is an issue for all industries, from advertising to politics to logistics, and for all countries from China to the USA to Brazil to South Africa.
What do you enjoy most about teaching students and why?
I have always loved trying to explain complicated things to people, so teaching is something I have always wanted to do from when I was very young, even if, as I said, for a long time I didn’t know how this would become possible. I love in particular the fact that at LSE we have students from so many countries, with so many professional and intellectual perspectives, all of them seriously engaged in trying to understand the world better. And I do my best to share my passion for ideas with students, and respond to their passion, in a way that is also realistic about the limits of what teaching can achieve in a deeply unequal world.
What do you like doing when you’re not busy being an academic?
I live in the countryside, so listening to the sounds of animals and observing the changing light is very important to me. I play the piano. I do my best to keep reasonably physically fit – but without any data devices to track me! And I try to read a range of novels from around the world in translation: I sometimes feel more connection with perspectives from, say, Korea or Latin America than from the UK, a result of the UK’s difficult politics of the past decade.