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.


You can subscribe and listen to Ideas Matter on iTunes, Spotify,
Podbean or SoundCloud. For full details of all episodes, visit
the podcast page on our website


Keep up-to-date with Ideas Matter and all the initiatives
organised by the Battle of Ideas charity by following us on
Twitter and on Facebook.


Email us at info@theboi.co.uk