Introduction

I am Professor of Communication Studies at SUNY Oswego, recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship, and a Fulbright Specialist from 2021 to 2025.

I am a co-founder of the Non-Aligned Technologies Movement and the network Tierra Común, and serve on the Board of Directors of Humanities New York, a National Endowment for the Humanities affiliate.

My research interests include critical internet studies, network theory and science, philosophy of technology, sociology of communication, and political economy of digital media.

My most recent op-ed is AI and the tyranny of the data commons.

My most recent book, co-authored with Nick Couldry, is The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating it for Capitalism. It is available from Stanford University Press (2019). My previous book, Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World (2013), was published by University of Minnesota Press. Find out more.

 

Selected Publications

	Mejias, U. (2023). Notes on the Historiography of Data Colonialism. In M. Filimowicz (Ed.), Decolonizing Data (Algorithms and Society Vol. 6). Routledge.	link
	Couldry, N. and Mejias, U. (2021). The decolonial turn in data and technology research: What is at stake and where is it heading?, Information, Communication & Society, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2021.1986102 Metrics: This article has been viewed around 13,000 times according to the journal.	link
	Couldry, N. and Mejias, U. (2019). The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating it for Capitalism. Stanford University Press. Translations:  Italian      Turkish       Spanish	link
	Mejias, U. and Couldry, N. (2019). Consumption as Production: Data and the Reproduction of Capitalist Relations. In F. Wherry and I. Woodward (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Consumption. Oxford University Press.	link
	Mejias, U. & Couldry, N. (2019). Datafication (Concepts of the digital society). Internet Policy Review, 8(4). DOI: 10.14763/2019.4.1428	link
	Couldry, N. & Mejias, U. (2019). Making data colonialism liveable: how might data’s social order be regulated? Internet Policy Review, 8(2). DOI: 10.14763/2019.2.1411	link
	Mejias, U. and Couldry, N. (2019). Colonialismo de datos: repensando la relación de los datos masivos con el sujeto contemporáneo. Virtualis: Revista de Cultural Digital, 10 (18). Ciudad de México.	link
	Couldry, N. and Mejias, U. (2018). Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject. Television & New Media, 20 (4). Metrics: This article has been downloaded around 28,000 times from the journal page, 18,000 times from the LSE page, and has 863 citations according to Google Scholar. The article has an Altmetric Attention Score of 278, making it the 5th article with the highest attention score published by the journal (impact factor of 1.245), and putting it in the top 5% of the more than 12 million research outputs tracked by Altmetric.	link
	Mejias, U. and Vokuev, N. (2017). Disinformation and the Media: The case of Russia and Ukraine. Media, Culture and Society (SAGE Journals).	link
	Mejias, U. (2013). Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World. University of Minnesota Press.	link
	Mejias, U. (2012). Liberation Technology and the Arab Spring: From Utopia to Atopia and Beyond. Fibreculture, Special Issue on Networked Utopias and Speculative Futures. http://twenty.fibreculturejournal.org/2012/06/20/fcj-147-liberation-technology-and-the-arab-spring-from-utopia-to-atopia-and-beyond/	link
	Clark, P., Mejias, U., Cavana, P., Herson, D., and Strong, S. M. (2011). Interactive Social Media and the Art of Telling Stories: Strategies for Social Justice Through Osw3go.net 2010: Racism on Campus. In B. Beyerbach and R. D. Davis (eds.) Activist Art in Social Justice Pedagogy. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
	Mejias, U. (2011). How I Used Wikis to Get My Students to Do Their Readings. In T. Scholz (ed.) Learning Through Digital Media: Essays on Technology and Pedagogy. Institute for Distributed Creativity. http://tinyurl.com/3mjfmwd	link
	Mejias, U. (2011). Towards a Critique of Digital Networks for Learning. Progressive Librarian, 34/35, 46-49.	link
	Mejias, U. (2011). The Twitter Revolution Must Die. International Journal of Learning and Media, (2) 4. http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/ijlm_a_00060
	Mejias, U. (2010). Peerless: The Ethics of P2P Network Disassembly. 4th Inclusiva.net Meeting: P2P Networks and Processes, Madrid, 6-10 July 2009, pp. 56-66, Madrid: Medialab Prado & Área de las Artes del Ayuntamiento de Madrid. (Spanish and English)	link
	Mejias, U. (2010). The Limits of Networks as Models for Organizing the Social. New Media & Society, (12) 4, 603-617.
	Mejias, U. (2010). “Playbor” on the Internet. Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, (37) 4 (January/February 2010), p. 2.
	Mejias, U. (2005). Re–approaching Nearness: Online Communication and its Place in Praxis. First Monday, (10) 3. http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1213/1133	link
	Mejias, U. (2001). Sustainable Communicational Realities in the Age of Virtuality. Critical Studies in Media Communication, (18) 2, 211-228.