Bruce Bimber | |
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![]() Bimber in 2024. | |
Nationality | American |
Occupation(s) | Professor, political scientist, communication scholar |
Academic background | |
Education | Ph.D. in Political Science (1992); BS Electrical Engineering (1983) |
Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Political science |
Sub-discipline | Political Communication,digital media,collective action |
Institutions | University of California,Santa Barbara |
Main interests | Political communication,social media,political behavior,collective action,technological determinism |
Notable works | Information and American Democracy (2003) |
Influenced | David Karpf, [1] Steven Livingston [2] |
Website | www |
Bruce A. Bimber FAAAS,FICA is an American social scientist,author,and academic. Bimber is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California,Santa Barbara (UCSB). He is known for his work in political communication,particularly the relationship between digital media and human behavior in political organization and collective action. Bimber was the founding director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at UCSB, [3] and the founder of the Center for Nanotechnology and Society, [4] [5] has been a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 2011, [6] and is a Fellow of the International Communication Association. [7] He is also a past Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
As an undergraduate,Bimber studied electrical engineering and graduated from Stanford University. Then,he worked in Silicon Valley in the 1980s. Bimber later studied political science and got his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992. Before joining the faculty at UC Santa Barbara in the mid-1990s,he spent a couple of years at the RAND Corporation in Washington,D.C.,where he worked on education policy and technology policy. [8]
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:
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]
In 2011,Bimber was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [6] He is also a fellow of the International Communication Association. He is also a past Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
The University of California, Santa Barbara is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, United States. Tracing its roots back to 1891 as an independent teachers' college, UCSB joined the ancestor of the California State University system in 1909 and then moved over to the University of California system in 1944. It is the third-oldest undergraduate campus in the system, after UC Berkeley and UCLA. Total student enrollment for 2022 was 23,460 undergraduate and 2,961 graduate students.
Media ecology theory is the study of media, technology, and communication and how they affect human environments. The theoretical concepts were proposed by Marshall McLuhan in 1964, while the term media ecology was first formally introduced by Neil Postman in 1968.
Technological utopianism is any ideology based on the premise that advances in science and technology could and should bring about a utopia, or at least help to fulfill one or another utopian ideal.
Science and technology studies (STS) or science, technology, and society is an interdisciplinary field that examines the creation, development, and consequences of science and technology in their historical, cultural, and social contexts.
E-democracy, also known as digital democracy or Internet democracy, uses information and communication technology (ICT) in political and governance processes. The term is credited to digital activist Steven Clift. By using 21st-century ICT, e-democracy seeks to enhance democracy, including aspects like civic technology and E-government. Proponents argue that by promoting transparency in decision-making processes, e-democracy can empower all citizens to observe and understand the proceedings. Also, if they possess overlooked data, perspectives, or opinions, they can contribute meaningfully. This contribution extends beyond mere informal disconnected debate; it facilitates citizen engagement in the proposal, development, and actual creation of a country's laws. In this way, e-democracy has the potential to incorporate crowdsourced analysis more directly into the policy-making process.
Theories of technological change and innovation attempt to explain the factors that shape technological innovation as well as the impact of technology on society and culture. Some of the most contemporary theories of technological change reject two of the previous views: the linear model of technological innovation and other, the technological determinism. To challenge the linear model, some of today's theories of technological change and innovation point to the history of technology, where they find evidence that technological innovation often gives rise to new scientific fields, and emphasizes the important role that social networks and cultural values play in creating and shaping technological artifacts. To challenge the so-called "technological determinism", today's theories of technological change emphasize the scope of the need of technical choice, which they find to be greater than most laypeople can realize; as scientists in philosophy of science, and further science and technology often like to say about this "It could have been different." For this reason, theorists who take these positions often argue that a greater public involvement in technological decision-making is desired.
Nelson Lichtenstein is an American historian. He is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy. He is a labor historian who has written also about 20th-century American political economy, including the automotive industry and Wal-Mart.
There are several approaches to defining the substance and scope of technology policy.
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a book by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler published by Yale University Press on April 3, 2006. The book has been recognized as one of the most influential works of its time concerning the rise and impact of the Internet on the society, particularly in the sphere of economics. It also helped popularize the term Benkler coined few years earlier, the commons-based peer production (CBPP).
Paul M. Leonardi was the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was also the Investment Group of Santa Barbara Founding Director of the Master of Technology Management Program. Leonardi moved to UCSB to found the Technology Management Program and start its Master of Technology Management and Ph.D. programs. Before joining UCSB, Leonardi was a faculty member in the School of Communication, the McCormick School of Engineering, and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
The Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara was founded in 1999 to support the interdisciplinary study of the cultural transitions and social innovations associated with contemporary information technology. CITS accomplishes this by connecting scholars in different disciplines studying similar phenomena related to technology and society, through both formal events and informal meetings of the center's faculty research affiliates. Currently, CITS faculty represent 13 departments on campus, spanning the Social Sciences, the College of Engineering, and the Humanities. In addition, the center supports graduate study through the administration of the Technology & Society Emphasis on campus. CITS is housed in the campus Office of Research, as a unit of the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research at the university.
Networked advocacy or net-centric advocacy refers to a specific type of advocacy. While networked advocacy has existed for centuries, it has become significantly more efficacious in recent years due in large part to the widespread availability of the internet, mobile telephones, and related communications technologies that enable users to overcome the transaction costs of collective action.
Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence is a 1978 book by the philosopher G. A. Cohen, the culmination of his attempts to reformulate Karl Marx's doctrines of alienation, exploitation, and historical materialism. Cohen, who interprets Marxism as a scientific theory of history, applies the techniques of analytic philosophy to the elucidation and defence of Marx's materialist conception of history.
Technological determinism is a reductionist theory in assuming that a society's technology progresses by following its own internal logic of efficiency, while determining the development of the social structure and cultural values. The term is believed to have originated from Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), an American sociologist and economist. The most radical technological determinist in the United States in the 20th century was most likely Clarence Ayres who was a follower of Thorstein Veblen as well as John Dewey. William Ogburn was also known for his radical technological determinism and his theory on cultural lag.
Orthodox Marxism is the body of Marxist thought which emerged after the deaths of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the late 19th century, expressed in its primary form by Karl Kautsky. Kautsky's views of Marxism dominated the European Marxist movement for two decades, and orthodox Marxism was the official philosophy of the majority of the socialist movement as represented in the Second International until the First World War in 1914, whose outbreak caused Kautsky's influence to wane and brought to prominence the orthodoxy of Vladimir Lenin. Orthodox Marxism aimed to simplify, codify and systematize Marxist method and theory by clarifying perceived ambiguities and contradictions in classical Marxism. It overlaps significantly with Instrumental Marxism.
Mutual shaping suggests that society and technology are not mutually exclusive to one another and, instead, influence and shape each other. This process is a combination of social determinism and technological determinism. The term mutual shaping was developed through science and technology studies (STS) in an attempt to explain the detailed process of technological design. Mutual shaping is argued to have a more comprehensive understanding of the development of new media because it considers technological and social change as directly affecting the other.
Sociotechnology is the study of processes on the intersection of society and technology. Vojinović and Abbott define it as "the study of processes in which the social and the technical are indivisibly combined". Sociotechnology is an important part of socio-technical design, which is defined as "designing things that participate in complex systems that have both social and technical aspects".
Robert W. Duggan is an American billionaire, entrepreneur, philanthropist, biotech executive, health care executive, educator, and human rights activist. He is the former CEO of biopharmaceutical company Pharmacyclics and was previously CEO of surgical systems maker Computer Motion from 1997 to 2003. Bob is the majority shareholder and is on the boards of directors of Pulse Biosciences and Summit Therapeutics, where he is also CEO.
Accelerated pluralism is a theory coined by American political scientist Bruce Bimber which claims that "the net is accelerating the process of issue group formation and action". As a method of mobilization, it relies on information communication technologies (ICT), particularly the Internet as a tool to promote all kinds of ideological projects or to form social movements. Bimber based his theory on the idea that "the processes of group-oriented politics will show less coherence and less correspondence with established private and public institutional structures".
Lisa Ann Parks is Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies and Director of the Global Media Technologies & Cultures (GMTaC) Lab at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She was formerly Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Science, Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she founded the GMTaC Lab. She won a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in 2018 for "exploring the global reach of information technology infrastructures".
David Karpf: Probably the biggest one is what I would call the "disruption thesis." A lot of what I'm discussing in my book when I'm looking at MoveOn.org or Daily Kos — all of this new generation of organizations — is very similar to what Bruce Bimber found in his 2003 book Information and American Democracy. Bruce was saying that when you radically change the technological medium, that creates opportunity for innovation. He talked about post-bureaucratic organizations. So I'm coming along nine years later and looking at what those organizations have turned out to be. It's very much in line with what he was then suggesting. But what really wasn't clear when he was researching for that book was that there's a generation gap among organizations. It's not the Environmental Defense Fund and the Sierra Clubs and the ACLU that are leading in terms of innovation. There's a real difference in how a MoveOn.org or a Daily Kos uses email, blogs, Twitter and all of these social media, compared to how the older activist groups do. This is what I call the "MoveOn" effect — this isn't about the effectiveness of MoveOn, per se — it's about changes in how we define members and how we raise money from members.
Bruce Bimber, director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara, falls somewhere in the middle. He thinks the population using the Internet is too diverse to accurately measure. No two people start using the Net at the same time, and as with TV viewing, their habits can vary greatly.
Another concerned expert is engineer and social scientist Bruce Bimber of the University of California at Santa Barbara. "We have to pay attention to nanotechnology before it hits us on the head," says Bimber, who founded the UCSB Center for Nanotechnology and Society to do just that.
Bimber is a former electrical engineer with roots in Silicon Valley who decided in the early '80s that he wanted to study what the computer revolution means for society, rather than contribute to the technology itself.
In 1998 Bruce Bimber observed cautiously that it would be some time before the full political impact of the Internet would become apparent. That modest assessment continues to be appropriate.
An important new study by two political scientists, Bruce Bimber of University of California at Santa Barbara and Richard Davis of Brigham Young, confirms what has been an established principle among political consultants since I started tracking online campaigning in 1998; the Internet is a great medium for communicating with your base, but not so great for attracting the attention of swing voters and converting them to your side.
Closing the conference, Bruce Bimber, a UCSB political scientist who has been studying the internet for three decades, described the online universe as a virtual Wild West that lacks the regulatory principles and governing bodies common to other megalithic global industries, such as agriculture, aviation and pharmaceuticals, among many others.
In fact, the notion of porous boundaries is evoked repeatedly in early Internet-related scholarship (e.g., Bimber et al. 2005; Brundidge 2010; Cammaerts and van Audenhove 2005).
Bruce Bimber further explains technological determinism as it applies to Marx's specific views on technology and culture. He is interested in the varied approaches in looking at technological determinism (TD) and explains Marx's outlook of human self-expression and resistance to alienation while arguing that Marx was more economically deterministic than he was technologically. TD states that a society's technology defines the growth of its social construct, overall culture, and societal beliefs and values. The phrase in this context, is often used in academia by sociologists and economists. Bimber doubts that Marx was himself purely determinist and sets out to explain technological determinism's three faces. All three faces are considered technologically deterministic, but Bimber cites how comparing them allows for a clearer understanding if Marx was a proponent of TD or not.
"Democracy is hard," says Bruce Bimber, distinguished professor of political science at UC Santa Barbara. "Accepting that people you disagree with are as legitimate as you are places high demands — in some ways, unrealistic demands — on an individual.