Manuel Castells Oliván is a Spanish sociologist especially associated with research on the information society, communication and globalization.
Barry Wellman, FRSC is a Canadian-American sociologist and is the co-director of the Toronto-based international NetLab Network. His areas of research are community sociology, the Internet, human-computer interaction and social structure, as manifested in social networks in communities and organizations. His overarching interest is in the paradigm shift from group-centered relations to networked individualism. He has written or co-authored more than 300 articles, chapters, reports and books. Wellman was a professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto for 46 years, from 1967 to 2013, including a five-year stint as S.D. Clark Professor.
Internet studies is an interdisciplinary field studying the social, psychological, pedagogical, political, technical, cultural, artistic, and other dimensions of the Internet and associated information and communication technologies. While studies of the Internet are now widespread across academic disciplines, there is a growing collaboration among these investigations. In recent years, Internet studies have become institutionalized as courses of study at several institutions of higher learning. Cognates are found in departments of a number of other names, including departments of "Internet and Society", "virtual society", "digital culture", "new media" or "convergent media", various "iSchools", or programs like "Media in Transition" at MIT. On the research side, Internet studies intersects with studies of cyberculture, human–computer interaction, and science and technology studies. Internet and society is a research field that addresses the interrelationship of Internet and society, i.e. how society has changed the Internet and how the Internet has changed society.
The USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism comprises a School of Communication and a School of Journalism at the University of Southern California (USC). Starting July 2017, the school’s Dean is Willow Bay, succeeding Ernest J. Wilson III. The graduate program in Communications is consistently ranked first according to the QS World University Rankings.
Jannis Kallinikos is an organization and communication scholar and intellectual. He was born in the town of Preveza, western Greece. He is also a citizen of Sweden. Kallinikos is currently a professor in the Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His scholarly projects have over the years covered several themes ranging from the significance writing and notation has assumed in the making of modern organizations through the understanding of markets as semiotic systems to the study of bureaucracy and institutions. His concerns have recently shifted to the investigation of the conditions associated with the penetration of the social and economic fabric by technological information. Kallinikos calls this emerging socio-economic environment, marked by the ubiquitous presence of the Internet, information-based services and software-mediated culture, the habitat of information. The term indicates that the growing involvement of information in society, economy and culture is associated with important changes in the ways institutions operate as well as shifts in behavioural, cognitive and communicative habits.
A. Michael Noll is an American engineer, and professor emeritus at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. He served as dean of the Annenberg School from 1992 to 1994. He was a very early pioneer in digital computer art and 3D animation and tactile communication.
The James H. and Mary B. Quello Center for Telecommunication Management & Law is a research center at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. Part of the Department of Media and Information at the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, the Quello Center is dedicated to original research on issues of information and communication management, law and policy. It is named for former Federal Communications Commission chairman James H. Quello.
Johannes M. Bauer is a professor in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. Since January 2013 he serves as the Chairperson of the Department. He is also affiliated with the Quello Center for Telecommunication Management and Law at the university.
Steven S. Wildman is U.S. scholar, academician and researcher who teaches and researches at one of the top-rated U.S. communications programs at Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. Wildman also serves as co-director of the university's Quello Center for Telecommunication Management and Law.
Merlyna Lim is a scholar studying ICT, particularly on the socio-political shaping of new media in non-Western contexts. She has been appointed a Canada Research Chair in Digital Media and Global Network Society in the School of Journalism and Communication Carleton University. Formerly she was a Visiting Research Scholar at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy and a Distinguished Scholar of Technology and Public Engagement of the School of Social Transformation Justice and Social Inquiry Program and the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. She previously held a Networked Public Research Associate position at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She got her PhD, with distinction, from University of Twente in Enschede, Netherlands, with a dissertation entitled @rchipelago Online: The Internet and Political Activism in Indonesia.
George Peter Lyman was an American professor of information science who taught at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information, and was well known in U.S. academia for his research on online information and his leadership in remaking university library systems for the digital era.
Ernest James Wilson III is an American scholar. Wilson was the Walter Annenberg Chair in Communication, and Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, California from 2007-2017. He stepped down as dean in June 2017 and was succeeded by Willow Bay. Dr. Wilson is the founder of USC Annenberg's Center for Third Space Thinking, which is devoted to research, teaching and executive education on soft skills in the digital age. Through the Center, Dr. Wilson's most recent research focuses on critical workforce competencies and talent and skills development in the 21st Century. As a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, he currently is writing a book on utilizing competencies via the framework of Third Space Thinking.
The Fifth Estate is a socio-cultural reference to groupings of outlier viewpoints in contemporary society, and is most associated with bloggers, journalists publishing in non-mainstream media outlets, and the social media or "social license". The "Fifth" Estate extends the sequence of the three classical Estates of the Realm and the preceding Fourth Estate, essentially the mainstream press. The use of "fifth estate" dates to the 1960s counterculture, and in particular the influential The Fifth Estate, an underground newspaper first published in Detroit in 1965. Web-based technologies have enhanced the scope and power of the Fifth Estate far beyond the modest and boutique conditions of its beginnings.
Brian D. Loader is currently Co-Director of the Centre for Political Youth Culture and Communication (CPAC) at the University of York, UK. Brian joined the Department of Sociology at York in January 2006 to pursue his scholarly interests into digital media communication and democratic governance. His overarching interest is in new media communications technologies, and the social, political and economic factors shaping their development and diffusion, and their implications for social, economic, political and cultural change. He has published widely in these areas and is the founding Editor of the international journal Information, Communication and Society whose aim and scope is to critically explore these issues in depth.
Philip E. Agre is a former associate professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His new media writing includes the essay, Surveillance and Capture. He was successively the publisher of The Network Observer (TNO) and The Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE). TNO ran from January 1994 until July 1996. RRE, an influential mailing list he started in the mid-1990s, ran for around a decade. A mix of news, Internet policy and politics, RRE served as a model for many of today's political blogs and online newsletters.
W. Russell Neuman is Professor of Media Technology, NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and Professor (Emeritus), Communication Studies, University of Michigan. From 2001 to 2013, Dr. Neuman was the John Derby Evans Professor of Media Technology at the University of Michigan. Neuman received a Ph.D. And M.A. At the University of California, Berkeley Department of Sociology as well as a B.A. from Cornell University's Department of Government. He has an extensive teaching and research career at Yale University, Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan. He is one of the earlier founding members at MIT Media Lab and taught at the department of political science where he acquainted with the late Ithiel de sola Pool.
The Center for Global Communication Studies (CGCS) is a research center located within the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. CGCS serves as a research hub for students and scholars worldwide studying comparative communication studies, media law, and media policy. The center also provides consulting and advisory assistance to academic centers, non-governmental organizations, regulators, lawyers, and governments throughout the world.
Philip N. Howard is a sociologist and communication researcher who studies the impact of information technologies on democracy and social inequality. He studies how new information technologies are used in both civic engagement and social control in countries around the world. He is Professor of Internet Studies at the Oxford Internet Institute and Balliol College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of eight books, including New Media Campaigns and The Managed Citizen, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, and Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up.
Stefaan G. Verhulst has been exploring the intersection of technology, science and policy for over two decades. He is the Co-Founder and as of 2013 Chief Research and Development Officer of the Governance Laboratory (GovLab) at New York University. His latest research and writing considers how advances in technology and science can be harnessed to create effective and collaborative forms of governance.
