Can human solidarity survive social media and what if it can’t?

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Contributor(s): Professor Nick Couldry, Baroness Beeban Kidron | Drawing on his recent book, The Space of the World, Nick Couldry will reflect on the global space of social communications and interaction that has been constructed over the past three decades through a commercialized internet and digital platforms whose business model depends on extracting data from users and shaping their behaviour to optimize advertising value. What if those conditions – valid perhaps in narrowly commercial terms – have guaranteed a space of human interaction that is larger, more polarized, more intense, and more toxic than is compatible with human solidarity? A space associated increasingly with toxic forms of political power and risks to the most vulnerable members of society? If so, we need to build a different space of the world, less likely to be toxic and more likely to generate the solidarity and effective cooperation that humanity absolutely needs if it is to have any chance of addressing its huge, shared challenges.