Siva Vaidhyanathan on the Operating System of Our Lives
Untangling the Web
English - November 26, 2021 18:58 - 20 minutes - 28.7 MB - ★★★★★ - 6 ratingsSocial Sciences Science Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Our guest for this episode is Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. Siva is a regular columnist for The Guardian as well as the author of Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford, 2018) and The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) (University of California Press, 2011), among other books. He focuses on how big tech companies – especially Google and Facebook – are permeating our lives.
In this conversation, Siva talks about the creation of Google Books and why he thinks Google was the wrong choice to be a platform that houses the world’s online library. He also talks about how authoritarian rulers have used Facebook to win elections and ties this fact into a discussion of the big tech companies’ race to become “the operating system of our lives” – and to manage everything from our houses to our minds.
Read this episode's transcript here: https://webscience.northwestern.edu/2021/02/04/episode-29-transcript/
See this episode's show notes here: https://webscience.northwestern.edu/2021/11/26/episode-29-show-notes/