Ph.D.  Massaschusetts Institute of Technology, 1992
personal home page: http://www.bimber.cits.ucsb.edu
office  phone:  805.694.8386

Professor Bimber's research examines the relationship between digital media and political behavior, especially in the domains of political organization and collective action.

He is the author of Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power (Cambridge University Press, 2003), which won the Don K. Price Award for Best Book on Science, Technology and Politics, and Campaigning Online: The Internet in U.S. Elections (with Richard Davis, Oxford University Press, 2003), which won the McGannon Communication Policy Award for social and ethical relevance in communication policy research. He is also author of The Politics of Expertise in Congress: The Rise and Fall of the Office of Technology Assessment (SUNY Press, 1996), and of many journal articles dealing with the relationship of technological change to collective action, politics, and civic engagement.  His next book, which wil be coauthored with Andrew Flanagin and Cynthia Stohl, will appear from Cambridge University Press and is entitled The Transformation of Collective Life. 

Professor Bimber is founder and Director Emeritus of the UCSB Center for Information Technology and Society, where he serves on the Faculty Steering Committee, and is a member of the Executive Committee of the NSF Center for Nanotechnology in Society at UCSB. He is also affiliated with the Department of Communication. Prior to joining the UCSB faculty in 1994, he worked for RAND in Washington, DC in a policy analysis department contracted to provide advice to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He has a doctorate in Political Science from MIT, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford.

Courses Taught:

Selected Recent Publications:

Weaver, D., Lively, E., and Bimber, B.  "Searching for a Frame: News Media Tell the Story of Technological Progress."  Science Communication (forthcoming).

Weaver, D. and Bimber, B. "Finding News Stories: A Comparison of LexisNexis and Google News," Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 85 (2009): 515-530.

Bimber, B., Flanagin, A., and Stohl, C. "Technological Change and the Shifting Nature of Political Organization," in Andrew Chadwick and Philip Howard, eds., Handbook of Internet and Politics.  Routledge, 2009, pp. 79-85. 

Bimber, B. "The Internet and Political Fragmentation," in Peter Nardulli, ed., Domestic Prespectives on Contemporary Democracy.  University of Illinois Press, 2008, pp. 155-170.

Bimber, B.  Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Bimber, B. and Davis, R. Campaigning Online: The Internet in US Elections.  Oxford University Press, 2003.