Christian Fuchs is an Austrian social scientist. From 2013 until 2022 he was Professor of Social Media and Professor of Media,Communication &Society at the University of Westminster,where he also was the Director of the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI). Since 2022,he has been Professor of Media Systems and Media Organisation at Paderborn University.[1] He is an editor for the open access journal tripleC:Communications,Capitalism &Critique.[2] Fuchs is also the co-founder of the ICTs and Society-network, a researcher network that studies societal and digital media interactions.[3] He is the editor of the book series 'Critical,Digital and Social Media Studies',which he helped establish in 2015.[4]
Fuchs was born in 1976 in the village of Waidhofen an der Thaya in Austria,where he lived until 18,whereby he then moved to Vienna.[5] This rural region of Northern Austria was at the time deindustrialized and the area he lived in was socially disadvantaged.[5]
In 1994 he studied informatics at the Vienna University of Technology until 2000,obtaining an MSc in informatics. He then became interested in the social and politico-economic impacts of communication technologies and chose to specialize in social informatics,then gaining his technical science PhD from the school's Institute for Design and Assessment of Technology. From 2000 to 2006 he lectured in sociology and philosophy of information technology at the department.[5]
Academic career
From 2015 until 2017,Fuchs was a member of the European Sociological Association's executive board,where he helped organize the 2017 ESA conference in Athens.[7]
In his 2014 book Social Media:A Critical Introduction, Fuchs expressed criticism towards media scholar Henry Jenkins and his 2007 book Convergence Culture, in which Jenkins explores participation in culture,for having excluded factors such as power and equality in his analysis and stated that Jenkins is a "cultural reductionist".[8]
Books (Monographs)
Internet and Society. Social Theory in the Information Age (Routledge,2008) ISBN978-0203937778
Practical Civil Virtues in Cyberspace: Towards the Utopian Identity of Civitas and Multitudo (Shaker, 2009) ISBN978-3832283414 (co-author Rainer E. Zimmermann)
Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies (Routledge, 2011) ISBN978-0415588812
Digital Labour and Karl Marx (Routledge 2014) ISBN0745339999
Social Media: A Critical Introduction (Sage 2014, first edition) ISBN978-1473966833
OccupyMedia! The Occupy Movement and Social Media in Crisis Capitalism (Zero Books, 2014) ISBN978-1782794059
Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media (Routledge, 2015) ISBN978-1138839311
Reading Marx in the Information Age: A Media and Communication Studies Perspective on Capital Volume 1 (Routledge 2016) ISBN978-1138948556
Critical Theory of Communication: New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet (University of Westminster Press, 2016) ISBN978-1911534044
Social Media: A Critical Introduction (Sage 2017, second edition) ISBN978-1473966826
The Online Advertising Tax as the Foundation of a Public Service Internet (University of Westminster Press, 2018) ISBN978-1911534938
Digital Demagogue: Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Twitter (Pluto Press, 2018) ISBN0745337961
Rereading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2019) ISBN978-0745339993
Nationalism on the Internet: Critical Theory and Ideology in the Age of Social Media and Fake News (Routledge, 2020) ISBN978-0367357665
Marxism: Karl Marx’s Fifteen Key Concepts for Cultural & Communication Studies (Routledge, 2020) ISBN978-0367418779
Communication and Capitalism: A Critical Theory (University of Westminster Press, 2020) ISBN978-1912656714
Marxist Humanism and Communication Theory. Media, Communication and Society Volume One (Routledge, 2021) ISBN978-0367697129
Social Media: A Critical Introduction (Sage, 2021, third edition) ISBN978-1529752748
Foundations of Critical Theory. Media, Communication and Society Volume Two (Routledge, 2021) ISBN978-1032057897
Communicating COVID-19. Everyday Life, Digital Capitalism, and Conspiracy Theories in Pandemic Times. SocietyNow Series (Emerald, 2021) ISBN978-1801177238
David Chandler and Christian Fuchs, eds. Digital Objects, Digital Subjects: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data (University of Westminster Press, 2019) ISBN978-1912656202
Jack Qiu and Christian Fuchs, eds. 2018. Ferments in the Field: The Past, Present and Future of Communication Studies (Special issue). Journal of Communication 68 (2): 219–451.
Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco, eds. 2016. Marx and the Political Economy of the Media. Studies in Critical Social Sciences, Volume 79. Leiden: Brill. ISBN978-9004291409 (Paperback: 2017. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, ISBN978-1608467082).
Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco, eds. 2016. Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism. Studies in Critical Social Sciences, Volume 80. Leiden: Brill. ISBN978-9004291386 (Paperback 2017. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, ISBN978-1608467099).
Eran Fisher and Christian Fuchs, eds. 2015. Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN978-1349570775
Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval, eds. 2014. Critique, Social Media and the Information Society. New York: Routledge. ISBN978-0415721080
Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs, eds. 2014. Social Media, Politics and the State: Protests, Revolutions, Riots, Crime and Policing in the Age of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. New York: Routledge. ISBN978-0415749091
Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco, eds. 2012. Marx is Back – The Importance of Marxist Theory and Research for Critical Communication Studies Today. tripleC – Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 10 (2): 127–632. Published open access: Available here
Christian Fuchs, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund, Marisol Sandoval, eds. 2012. Internet and Surveillance. The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media. New York: Routledge. ISBN978-0415633642
Margit Appel, Ronald Blaschke, Christian Fuchs, Manfred Füllsack and Luise Gubitzer, eds. 2006. Grundeinkommen – In Freiheit tätig sein (Guaranteed Basic Income – Activity in Freedom). Berlin: Avinus. ISBN3930064731
Vladimir Arshinov and Christian Fuchs, eds. 2003. Causality, Emergence, Self-Organisation. Moscow: NIA-Priroda. ISBN5956200065
Christiane Floyd, Christian Fuchs, Wolfgang Hofkirchner, eds. 2002. Stufen zur Informationsgesellschaft. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski (Steps Towards the Information Society: Festschrift for Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday). Vienna: Peter Lang. ISBN978-3631376423
Articles
Christian Fuchs & Sebastian Sevignani, tripleC, vol. 11, no 2, 2013, p.237–229[9]
1 2 3 4 Lent, John A.; Amazeen, Michelle A. (2015), Lent, John A.; Amazeen, Michelle A. (eds.), "Christian Fuchs", Key Thinkers in Critical Communication Scholarship: From the Pioneers to the Next Generation, London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp.13–37, doi:10.1057/9781137463418_2, ISBN978-1-137-46341-8, retrieved 2025-04-28
↑ "Christian Fuchs". The Conversation. 6 January 2016. Retrieved 2019-11-28.
↑ "Christian Fuchs". European Sociological Association. Retrieved 29 April 2025.
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