Bruce Bimber

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.

Bruce Bimber FAAAS, FICA
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.brucebimber.net

Biography

Early life and education

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]

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:

1. Norm Based Accounts
2. Unintended Consequences Accounts
3. 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]

Fellowships

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.

Selected publications

Books

• Bimber, B. (2003). Information and American democracy: Technology in the evolution of political power. Cambridge University Press.^[1]
• Bimber, B. A. (1996). The politics of expertise in Congress: The rise and fall of the Office of Technology Assessment. SUNY Press. ISBN 9780791430590

• Bimber, B., Flanagin, A., & Stohl, C. (2012). Collective action in organizations: Interaction and engagement in an era of technological change. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521191722
• Bimber, B., & Davis, R. (2003). Campaigning online: The Internet in US elections. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198034575

Selected recent journal articles

• Bimber, B., Labarre, J., Gomez, D., Nikiforov, I., & Koc-Michalska, K. (2024). Media use, feelings of being devalued, and democratically corrosive sentiment in the US. International Journal of Press/Politics. doi:10.1177/19401612241253455
• Gelovani, S., Theocharis, Y., Koc-Michalska, K., & Bimber, B. (2024). Intergroup ethnocentrism and social media: Evidence from three western democracies. Information, Communication & Society. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2024.2375259
• Gomez, D., Gueirrez Garcia-Pardo, I., Labarre, J., & Bimber, B. (2024). Beyond Large Language Models: Rediscovering the role of classical statistics in modern data science. Proceedings of the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence.
• Theocharis, Y., Boulianne, S., Koc-Michalska, K., & Bimber, B. (2023). Platform affordances and political participation: How social media reshape political engagement. West European Politics, 46(4), 788-811. doi:10.1080/01402382.2022.2087410
• Mei, A., Kabir, A., Levy, S., Subbiah, M., Allaway, E., Judge, J., Patton, D., Bimber, B., McKeown, K., & Yang, W. (2022). Mitigating covertly unsafe text within natural language systems. Findings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. arXiv:2210.09306
• Bimber, B. & Gil de Zúñiga, H. (2022).  Social influence and political participation around the world. European Journal of Political Science, 14(2), 135-154. doi:10.1017/S175577392200008X

References

1. Wihbey, John (2012-07-02). "Research chat: David Karpf, scholar of Internet organizing and activism". The Journalist's Resource. Retrieved 2024-08-06. 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.
2. Livingston, Steven (2013). "Remerciements". La Révolution de l'Information en Afrique: 58–59.
3. "THE NET EFFECT Series: LIFE ONLINE: [SOUTH". www.proquest.com. Retrieved 2024-08-05. 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.
4. "The minuscule risks we ignore - ProQuest". www.proquest.com. ProQuest 356680344. Retrieved 2024-08-05. 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.
5. "Unchecked nano development a no-no: [1 All-round - ProQuest". www.proquest.com. ProQuest 357534405. Retrieved 2024-08-05.
6. Staff, Indy (2011-01-12). "Eight UCSB Faculty Members Named AAAS Fellows". The Santa Barbara Independent. Retrieved 2024-08-06.
7. "Bruce Bimber | Department of Political Science - UC Santa Barbara". www.polsci.ucsb.edu. Retrieved 2024-08-06.
8. "SCIENCE WATCH; Taking a Broader Look at - ProQuest". www.proquest.com. ProQuest 421515941. Retrieved 2024-08-05. 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.
9. Schlozman, Kay Lehman; Verba, Sidney; Brady, Henry E. (June 2010). "Weapon of the Strong? Participatory Inequality and the Internet". Perspectives on Politics. 8 (2): 487–509. doi:10.1017/S1537592710001210. ISSN 1537-5927. 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.
10. "Persuasion Too? - ProQuest". www.proquest.com. ProQuest 215698857. Retrieved 2024-08-12. 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.
11. "Technology and democracy in crisis: time to 'get uncomfortable and get curious'". The Current. 2023-10-11. Retrieved 2024-08-06. 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.
12. Brundidge, Jennifer (2024-06-01). "The Public Sphere Is "Too Darn Hot": Social Identity Complexity as a Basis for Authentic Communication". Journalism and Media. 5 (2): 688–701. doi:10.3390/journalmedia5020045. ISSN 2673-5172. 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).
13. Falcone, Daniel (2022-05-06). "Karl Marx: Student and Teacher of Technology". CounterPunch.org. Retrieved 2024-08-06. 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.
14. "Democracy is more fragile than you think". University of California. 2024-02-01. Retrieved 2024-08-06. "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.

External links

• Bimber's Web Site