Siva Vaidhyanathan on the Operating System of Our Lives

<p>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 <em>Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy </em>(Oxford, 2018) and <em>The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) </em>(University of California Press, 2011),<em> </em>among other books. He focuses on how big tech companies –&nbsp;especially Google and Facebook – are permeating our lives.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Read this episode's transcript here: https://webscience.northwestern.edu/2021/02/04/episode-29-transcript/</p> <p>See this episode's show notes here: https://webscience.northwestern.edu/2021/11/26/episode-29-show-notes/</p>