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209. Life in an Attention Economy (with Mark Bergen & Padmini Ray Murray)
How YouTube Changed the World
Speakers
Across the world, people watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Every minute, more than five hundred additional hours of footage are uploaded to the site, a technical feat unmatched in the history of computing. YouTube invented the attention economy we all live in today, forever changing how people are entertained, informed, and paid online. Everyone knows YouTube. And yet virtually no one knows how it works.
In this episode of BIC talks, Mark Bergen, Business and Tech journalist and author of the book, Like, Comment, Subscribe is in conversation with Padmini Ray Murray, researcher and founder of Design Beku; and reveals the riveting, behind-the-scenes account of YouTube’s technology and business -how it helped its parent company Google achieve unimaginable power, introduces the narrative told through the people who run YouTube and the famous stars born on its stage. It’s the story of a revolution in media and an industry run amok, how a devotion to a simple idea—let everyone broadcast online and make money doing so—unleashed an outrage and addiction machine that spun out of the company’s control and forever changed the world.
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Speakers
Mark Bergen
Mark Bergen writes about the business of technology for Bloomberg Technology and Businessweek.
Previously, he reported for Recode and Advertising Age. Before that, he reported from India, where his work appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, the Atlantic Cities, the Wall St. Journal, Times of London, TIME, Quartz, GQ, the BBC, Mint, The Caravan, and The New Yorker (dot com), et cetera. And before that, he wrote for GOOD (in its glory days), Tablet, the Chicago Reader, and The Awl (rest in peace).
Akash Kapur, writing in The New Yorker, ranked his profile of India’s central banker for The Caravan among the best business writing of 2013. Mark’s coverage of Google and YouTube has won awards at the San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York Press Clubs.
Padmini Ray Murray
Padmini Ray Murray’s research-led practice focuses on challenging acts of infrastructural and algorithmic violence, and creating alternative digital spaces and imaginations that are characterised by feminist values, specifically an ethics of care. To explore the possibilities of manifesting these spaces, Padmini founded Design Beku, a design and digital collective, that aims to dismantle expectations created by market-driven notions of design by following design justice principles, that advocate designing with communities, and not for. Her creative work includes Darshan Diversion, a feminist videogame about the Sabarimala temple controversy; Visualising Cybersecurity (with Paulanthony George & CIS, 2019) about how cybersecurity is represented in the media; On Affecting the Archive (as artist in residence at Serendipity Arts Festival, 2020). Her work has been recently featured as a highlight of the Wired Women programme for the NEoN Digital Arts Festival and she recently exhibited her work as part of a residency, Unstacked: articulations of the algorithmic condition at Khoj Studios. Padmini’s published work focuses on how corporate online spaces commit and perpetuate epistemological violence against the marginalised through collusions of infrastructure and the interface.
