New Book Looks at ‘Costs of Connection’ for Personal Data Online

New Book Looks at ‘Costs of Connection’ for Personal Data Online

From invasive social platforms to data breaches, daily headlines paint a cautionary tale of information on the internet, which is explored in depth in a new book, Costs of Connection (Stanford University Press, 2019), co-authored by Ulises Mejias (above) of SUNY Oswego’s communication studies faculty and Nick Couldrey of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

“There is a new kind of colonial land grab going on, but it’s not for territory or resources; it’s for our data,” Mejias said. “Our social lives are being quantified and converted into data for the benefit of a few, and we argue in this book that this constitutes a new kind of ‘data colonialism.’”

The book represents “a response to a growing uneasiness about what happens when practically everything we do is captured by digital networks, nothing is excluded and social life becomes a direct input to capitalism,” he said.

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