An EconoTimes perspective

Liam Cole Young

Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Carleton University

Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Carleton University Liam Cole Young is a media theorist who studies how technical histories of data, information, and infrastructure intersect with cultural histories of music, film, sports, and administration. He researches and teaches across a range of topics and periods—from early modern double-entry bookkeeping and state bureaucracies to 20th century pop music and box office charts; from logistical media of ports, shipping containers, and barcodes to the history and rise of sports gambling; from Y2K and the first dotcom crash to the cod fisheries and fur trade of the 17th and 18th centuries; from financialization and blockchain bro culture to common salt and human hands as media of culture. In each case, I am interested primarily in questions of epistemology (how we know about these things) and infrastructure (how they are built into and operate in the world). His first book, List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to BuzzFeed (Amsterdam University Press, 2017; Open Access) explored such themes by tracing the list as a cultural technique of administration and imagination. His current book project is on the history of salt and positions sodium chloride as a medium of culture and civilization. He is also developing a long-term project on sports gambling, datafication, and financialization.