Academia and research work
At UC Santa Barbara,Bimber has been affiliated with the Department of Political Science,and the Center for Information Technology and Society (which he founded in 1999),and has a courtesy appointment with the Department of Communication. He is also involved with the Center for Responsible Machine Learning. Bimber’s research examines how digital media affect democratic politics,with a particular focus on the problems associated with social media,such as selective exposure,polarization,populism,and disinformation.
Bimber's book "Information and American Democracy" (2003,Cambridge University Press) explored how radical changes in technological mediums create opportunities for innovation,highlighting the concept of post-bureaucratic organizations. In this book and earlier work going back to the late 1990s,Bimber argued that optimists,including those in Silicon Valley, who believed the Internet would boost political participation among citizens were wrong. Instead,he argued,the Internet was facilitating people finding and creating political groups for advocacy and protest. This acceleration of collective action among engaged citizens was the signature effect of the early Internet. Years later,#MeToo,Black Lives Matter,and the surge in right-wing political organizations of the 2010s illustrated this effect. In a 2012 interview,political scientist David Karpf of George Washington University later referenced Bimber's work,noting that a new generation of organizations like MoveOn.org and Daily Kos exemplified Bimber's theories by utilizing email,blogs,Twitter,and other social media in ways that older activist groups did not. Karpf termed this phenomenon the "MoveOn" effect,underscoring a generational shift in how membership and fundraising are approached in the digital age. [1]
Bimber has long argued that the impact of the Internet on political behavior is complex. [9] [10] In 2000,he said the Internet should not be viewed as a single entity with a uniform effect,that is either good or bad,and more research was needed to understand its impact fully. [3] He characterized the internet then as a "virtual Wild West," highlighting the lack of regulatory principles and governing bodies comparable to other major global industries. Bimber has noted how in the last decade the increasing harm associated with the internet has become clear,highlighting the need for meaningful and serious public policy changes,and calling for a re-evaluation of societal approaches and corporate responsibility,especially in light of rapid AI advancements. He has argued that unless AI regulations are established soon,the new industry will quickly achieve the same political status as the Internet industry,in which powerful firms defend the unregulated free-market status quo in order to protect huge streams of revenue. [11] [12]
In his early work,Bimber also explored technological determinism in relation to Karl Marx’s views,highlighting Marx's focus on human self-expression and resistance to alienation rather than purely technological determinism. He argues that Marx was more economically deterministic,challenging the notion that Marx was a pure determinist in technological terms. Bimber categorized historic approaches to technological determinism in three groups:
- Norm Based Accounts
- Unintended Consequences Accounts
- Logical Sequence Accounts.
According to Bimber,Marx’s views aligned more with the socially constructed Norm Based and Unintended Consequences Accounts,rather than the fixed Logical Sequence Accounts. [13]
Bimber's current projects current projects focus on conspiracy theories and other falsehoods in the US and Europe. He uses survey techniques and Large Language Models (LLMs) to study democratically corrosive content in the public sphere. Bimber's recent research shows that different social media platforms have variable implications for the spread of conspiracy theories and other falsehoods. The stronger underlying social ties in Facebook and related social media make extremist content more impactful on individuals than is the case for X/Twitter and related social media in which social ties among users are weaker or non-existent. His work emphasizes the difference between being exposed to democratically corrosive content in social media and being affected by it. [14]
