Vincent Mosco: To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World
Sep 25, 2013
2.00pm - 4.00pm
Harrow Campus, University of Westminster
Room A7.03
Registration: email to [log in to unmask], at latest until Sep 22
Abstract
This presentation offers an account of the political, economic, social
and cultural issues emerging from the growth of cloud computing. It
starts by situating cloud computing as a major force in the
globalisation of informational capitalism and in the advance of a
particular way of knowing, what I call digital positivism. It proceeds
to examine the origins of cloud computing in the movements that arose in
the pre-internet era to create an information utility.
The presentation then defines cloud computing, describes its major
characteristics, and identifies the leading corporate, and government
cloud players. In doing so, it describes the battles for market power
among a handful of companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft,
Facebook, and Rackspace, the rapid and, for some, worrisome, expansion
of the government cloud, the internationalisation of cloud computing,
and the emergence of bottom-up community cloud projects.
Next, it considers how the cloud is being marketed and mythologised
through advertising, social media, corporate and government research,
industry lobbying, and marketing events. Massive promotion is essential
because dark clouds are gathering over the industry including the
environmental problems created by data centres; concerns over privacy,
security, and surveillance; and labour issues, particularly the impact
on IT departments, and more generally on knowledge workers whose jobs
are threatened by the cloud. The presentation concludes by offering a
technical and a cultural critique of big data, digital positivism, and
the cloud’s “way of knowing.”
Biography
Dr Vincent Mosco is Professor Emeritus, Queen's University, Canada. He
is formerly Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society and
Professor of Sociology. Dr Mosco graduated from Georgetown University
(Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) in 1970 and received a Ph.D. in
Sociology from Harvard University in 1975.
Dr Mosco is the author of numerous books on communication, technology,
and society. His most recent include Marx is Back – The Importance of
Marxist Theory and Research for Critical Communication Studies Today,
ed. with Christian Fuchs and published as a special issue of
tripleC–Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society
(http://www.triple-c.at) 2012, Getting the Message: Communications
Workers and Global Value Chains (co-edited with Catherine McKercher and
Ursula Huws, Merlin, 2010), The Political Economy of Communication,
second edition (Sage, 2009), The Laboring of Communication: Will
Knowledge Workers of the World Unite (co-authored with Catherine
McKercher, Lexington Books, 2008), Knowledge Workers in the Information
Society (co-edited with Catherine McKercher, Lexington Books, 2007), and
The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (MIT Press, 2004). The
Digital Sublime won the 2005 Olson Award for outstanding book in the
field of rhetoric and cultural studies.
Dr Mosco is a member of the editorial boards of academic journals in the
North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He has held research
positions in the US government with the White House Office of
Telecommunication Policy, the National Research Council and the US
Congress Office of Technology Assessment, and in Canada with the Federal
Department of Communication. Dr Mosco is a founding member of the Union
for Democratic Communication, served as head of the Political Economy
section of the International Association for Media and Communication
Research, and was a longtime research associate of the Harvard
University Program on Information Resources Policy. In addition, he has
been a consultant to trade unions and worker organisations in Canada and
the United States. In 2004 Dr Mosco received the Dallas W Smythe Award
for outstanding achievement in communication research.
Dr Mosco is currently working on an edited collection, Critical Studies
in Communication and Society, ed. with Cao Jin and Leslie Reagan Shade,
to be published by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House, and a book
on the political, economic, and cultural significance of cloud computing.
|