Liam Cole Young

Biography

I currently serve as Program Head of COMS and Co-Director of the School of Journalism and Communication. See this welcome message for more on my work in this role.

My scholarship and teaching span four overlapping areas: media theory and cultural techniques, histories of data and information, infrastructure studies, and internet studies.

I am presently working on two major projects:

• Salt Studies: Techniques of Taste and Time traces global histories of salt and positions this seemingly banal substance as a medium of culture and civilization.
• All In: Gambling, Speculation, and the Financialization of Sport situates the recent legalization and mainstreaming of sports gambling within longer histories of datafication, financialization, and speculation.

Generally, I work within what is sometimes called the “civilizational” stream of media theory, especially its Canadian and German variants, typified by Innis, McLuhan, Benjamin, and Kittler (among others).

The question of how human societies hold together across time and space animates my teaching and research across a range of topics—from early modern double-entry bookkeeping and state bureaucracies to 20^th 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 the cod fisheries and fur trade of the 17^th and 18^th centuries 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). My 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.

The transatlantic nature of my work has led to visiting positions at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany (2018) and the Department of Digital Design og Informationsvidenskab at Aarhus University, Denmark (2021).

I am available to supervise graduate students who are interested in sports, popular culture, platform and internet studies, media history and theory, histories of data and information, and recent debates in infrastructure studies.

Selected Publications

Books

Young, Liam C. 2017. List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to BuzzFeed. Amsterdam University Press.

Reviews: Canadian Journal of Communication (September 2020), Ian Reilly; Cultural Politics 14.3 (Fall 2018), Rob Coley; Leonardo (May 2018), Jan Baetens; LSE Review of Books (December 2017), Marianne Koob

Articles and Chapters

Young, Liam C. 2024. “All In: Derivative and Financialization in Sports Betting.” Cultural Politics 20, no 1. 

Young, Liam C. 2022. “Film Box Office Charts and the Metadata of Culture.” In Interrogating Datafication: Towards a Praxeology of Data. Edited by Marcus Burkhardt, Daniela van Geenen, Carolin Gerlitz, Sam Hind, Timo Kaerlein, Danny Lämmerhirt, Axel Volmar. transcript Verlag.

Young, Liam C., Hannah Dick and Chris Russill. 2021. “Introduction: Into the Air” and “A History of the Idea of Speaking into the Air: A Conversation with John Durham Peters.” Media Theory 5.2.

Young, Liam C. 2021. “Colonization’s Logistical Media: The Ship and the Document.” In Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media. Edited by Matthew Hockenberry, Nicole Starosielski and Susan Zieger. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Young, Liam C. 2020. “Salt: Fragments from the History of a Medium.” Theory, Culture and Society. 37, no. 6.

Young, Liam C. 2020. “Harold Innis’s Office: Techniques of Scholarship and Textual Production.” Amodern 10: Technique.

Young, Liam C. 2019. “The Innis-McLuhan Field: In Search of Media Theory” Canadian Journal of Communication (special Issue on “Many McLuhans”).

Young, Liam C. and Ira Wagman. 2019. “On the Mediality of Two Towers: Calgary—Toronto”. Imaginations 10, no. 2.

Young, Liam C. 2017. “Innis’s Infrastructure: Dirt, Beavers, and Documents in Material Media Theory.” Cultural Politics 13, no. 2.

Young, Liam C. 2015. “Cultural techniques and logistical media: Tuning Anglo-American and German media studies.” M/C Journal 18, no. 2 (Feature article in special issue on ‘Technique’)

Commentary

Young, Liam C. 2026. “How sports betting is changing the way people watch sports.” The Conversation Canada. 18 February.

Young, Liam C. 2023. “The Ottawa Senators bidding war is about a lot more than ticket sales and star power.” The Conversation Canada. 17 May.