Ideas Matter: Culture Wars: then and now, episode 10: ‘The Personalised Century’

If the twentieth was the Mass Century, Timandra Harkness argues that the twenty-first is the Personalised Century – a time when mass production, mass media, and mass politics are giving way to customised manufacture, social media and identity politics. But what are the implications? Is the irony of the turn to a personalised world that the person is disappearing?

LECTURER
Timandra Harkness, journalist, writer and broadcaster; presenter of Radio 4’s FutureProofing; author, Big Data: does size matter?

TALKING POINTS IN THIS PODCAST
• Understanding the Mass Century and the Personalised Century
• Unprecedented choice, both material and social, and the role of technology in making the personalised century possible, by profiling each of us through the data we sweat at every turn.
• The role of identity in driving this turn to a personalised world from which the person is, ironically, disappearing.

ADDITIONAL READING AND LISTENING
Big Data: Does Size Matter? by Timandra Harkness, Bloomsbury Sigma, 2016
Identity by Timandra Harkness and Leo Johnson, Futureproofing episode, Radio 4, 2015, 2001

THE ACADEMY 2019
In the context of today’s instrumental approaches to knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest attempt to demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth of the university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the pursuit of truth.

IDEAS MATTER PODCAST
Ideas Matter is a podcast that takes the most important issues of our times and explores the ideas and intellectual trends that have shaped where we are today.

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